Customer Reviews

A Plague of All Cowards

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This is Barton's second novel. After it was published, he took 14 years off from being published and returned a much better writer.

The plot of this short novel has Captain Tharkie hired to track down and apprehend the assassin who almost killed the legislative body of the Terran Colony System. Tharkie is a Starover, sort of privateer and bounty hunter rolled into one. Helping Tharkie are his shipmates and fellow Starovers, most veterans of bitter war. And the assassin also fits that bill. Wrapped up with this is a 1000 year old police robot, an amalgam of a telepathic human and "psychic incongruity" seeking transcendence, a plot to expand the human sphere of space, and a pointless subplot involving an aristocrat and his wife.

The novel has far too many inane conversations and descriptions of characters and clothings, an air of pseudo-sophistication in the talk of cocktails, many descriptions of switches being flipped, and lengthy descriptions of starflight.

There are hints of the future Barton in the incoherently expressed idea of soldiers and lovers banding against the universe, finding comfort only with each other - even if it's merely the comfort of a polite execution. As with some of his later work, one can detect a bit of the influence of Cordwainer Smith and H. Beam Piper.