Customer Reviews

RADIANT

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By my count, this is the 6th book in Gardner's "League of Peoples" universe. In no particular order, earlier books are "Expendable," "Hunted," "Vigilant," "Trapped," and "Ascending." Technically, I suppose, the lamentable "Commitment Hour" should be included, but let's not.

Not all of those books have focused on Explorers, so-called Expendable Crew Members, but they figure in most. ECMs, in Gardner's universe, have physical flaws. Youn Su, the protagonist of this novel, has an ulcer on her cheek; Festina Ramos, the character who links many of these six novels, has a portwine stain. In Gardner's universe, casualties among Explorers are less harmful to the morale of the rest of the crew because of those physical flaws. That's the premise, anyway.

Another premise of Gardner's universe is that earth folk are very junior members of the League of Peoples. The senior members are omniscicent, omnipotent and omnipresent. As an example, the League defines "non-sentient" as someone who kills another. The senior members of the League punish "non-sentience" by killing non-sentients who venture into space.

Other premises include human pheromones, glass-like, transparent humans, an utterly corrupt and incompetent earth government, evolution to higher levels by chemistry and mystic radiation, morbid and pathological fear of evolution to higher levels, and semi-intelligent nanotechnology.

If you just lay it out like that, the premises read like a checklist of science fiction's silliest ideas. Shades of Kilgore Trout. Whatever else, you have to check your disbelief at the door when you read one of these books.

But despite all of those silly premises and silly science, these books are a lot of fun to read. And in the last few, at least, there is something more than mere entertainment involved. In "Radiant," for example, there is an interesting clash between Eastern - well, quasi-Buddhist - and Western action heros. Gardner does an effective job of contrast, although I could wish he had added Tut as a more fully-developed character; Tut is an semi-sane, trickster hero, a non-malevolent Loki. But Tut is mostly overshadowed.

But what is most striking about Gardner across these six novels is how much his writing has improved. If you read or re-read "Expendable," his first book, with "Radiant," his most recent, the improvement is palpable. Language, dialog, description, characterization; all show very substantial improvement. Even the level of silly science is down a bit.

So yes, I like this book, and I like Gardner. Good yarns, well told. I'd even recommend it. But it may be that Gardner as an increasingly sophisticated writer, is outgrowing the very unsophisticated premises that underpin this series.

This was a light and pleasurable read this weekend, the latest in James Alan Gardner's "expendable" universe. I read the first novel when it initially came out several years ago and then failed to notice the intervening releases. I was pleasantly surprised, when I started reading this one, that missing the in-between novels didn't affect my enjoyment of this book.

The "expendable" universe is one where humanity has ventured to the stars and promptly found that there are many alien cultures out there, most of which are far more advanced than man. These cultures have a rule against killing sentient life. If you do it, and then try to leave your solar system, you are zapped as a " dangerous non-sentient". Humanity splits into two cultures, the Technocracy and the Unity, one averse to tinkering with genes and the other gung-ho about it. Nicely though, unlike most of our history, these two cultures don't fight each other....since doing so would get them all erased as non-sentients....they just kind of bicker like a divorced couple.

In this novel, Ugly Screaming Stink-Baby, otherwise known as Youn Sue, is a 19 year old cadre of the Explorers, an arm of the Technocracy Navy. the Explorers are scouts that are sent ahead of the regular Navy to explore new worlds, and to determine all the myriad things that can kill people on them. Think of the expendable ensigns on the old Star Trek shows and you'll get the idea. Actually, that probably is where Gardner got the idea. Naturally the mortality rate within this elite group is high; so the technocracy response i sto satff the Explorers only with humans that are disfigured. Thse people are considered expendable.

In this delightful tale, Youn Sue, a Buddhist, is first infected by a red, spore like sentience that calls itself the Balrog, and which is far smarter than any human. She then is called to rescue a group of Unity Scouts along with the indomitable Admiral Ramos and another explorer, Tut. The Unity scouts, although dispersed around the planet, all disappeared at once and the Explorer's are the closest group when the mayday comes in. They must solve the puzzle of the missing scouts and determine why the Balrog attacked Youn Sue, while fending off velociraptors on an archaelogical mystery planet. This book was a lot of fun and perfect light reading on a weekend when I had the flu. It's not destined to be a sci-fi classic but I did enjoy reading it.

I have been facinated by the Expendable universe from the very first book, and have read all that James Alan Gardner has published. This story is a fast read and filled with surprises. More facts are revealed about the upper level aliens and best of all there is a reason for their sticking their nose in Human business. Striving and the journey are more important than actual conclusions. And being sentient is more than just being able to think.

EXPENDABLE Explorer Third Class Youn Sue is trained to handle the most difficult, dangerous and deadly assignments as expected of a member of the Explorer Corps. She and her Explorer peers are disposables enabling a detached mankind to rationalize their deaths without any emotional attachment, remorse or guilt for who cares that an "Ugly Screaming Stink Girl" like Youn dies.

The Pistachio space ship Captain Cohen sends Third Class Youn and her partner Second Class Tut to Zoonau on Cashling to save innocent lives from the highly intelligent (much more than humans) Balrog. The duo are assigned to work with legendary Admiral Festina Ramos as the Balrog has just begun a chess game in which this sentient knows the opponents' plans while other beings have started their own cat and mouse deadly diversions with genocide as a possibility unless the disposable trio finds away to stop two devastating threats..

The latest expendable Explorer Corps tale is an exhilarating outer space thriller that takes off the moment Youn receives the assignment and never lets up until the final altercation. The action is faster than the speed of light, but the key characters make the story line more than just another adventure tale. Youn is a wonderful star as she is filled with psychological woes from her youth (this time you can blame the mom); Tut is a likable nut; finally the renowned admiral is real and different from the mythical legend. Even Balrog comes across as alien, but a complete ET. SF readers will appreciate this tale that shows one must honorably take responsibility (not just lip service) for one's actions.

Harriet Klausner

I agree with the reviewer who stated that the author just gets better with each book. I love his characters, and even loved his "commitment hour." This book does indeed have buddhist overtones. Along with a great story and the usual science fiction adventure, there is some serious discussion about what makes us who we are. I recommend this book highly for any lover of science fiction.

Radiant is an excellent book in its own right and serves as a capstone to the League of Peoples series. It brings together plot threads from the other books and weaves them together with a story that's interesting in its own right. Although it doesn't resolve everything (this wasn't intended to be the last League of Peoples book), fans of the series can get glimpses of where the next books might have gone. The book itself is very well written, and parts of it are laugh out loud funny. I strongly recommend the League of Peoples books to anyone with even a passing interest in science fiction, but because Radiant does draw together plot threads from the other books, it isn't a great place for a new reader to start.

It took me a while to finally get to this book. I read the last of Gardner's Festina Ramos books 9 years ago and just hadn't gotten around to buying this. Since it's been several years since this came out and there's no sequel, I guess we can say that (for now anyway) it's the end of the line. And it was a pretty good end.

Like all of Gardner's books in this series it's told in first person. Except for "Expendable" these have all featured someone other than Admiral Festina Ramos, but she always shows up. "Radiant" is no exception to this. The narrator in question is Youn Suu, who hails from a planet colonized by Burmese people. When something went wrong in her bioengineering, she was left with a deformed left cheek--on her face of course.

This gets her into the Explorer Corps. The Explorers are all disfigured in some way because some scientific studies determined that people feel the loss of an ugly person less acutely than an attractive one. On Youn's first real assignment she goes to a planet that's being attacked by glowing red moss known as the Balrog. There she meets Ramos and gets bitten by the Balrog, so that it begins taking over her body's cells.

From there Youn and Ramos follow a distress call to Muta, where a colony of scientists has disappeared. As they go down to the surface, they're attacked by strange smoke monsters who emit EMP to disable electronics. In the process of determining who these monsters are and what they want, Youn and Ramos make some discoveries about the universe--and themselves.

Unlike when I read "Trapped" last year, which was mostly a spin-off of the same universe, for this one you really need to have read the rest of the series. Given that this is sort of an ending, there are references to stuff that happened in the previous Ramos stories--Expendable, Vigilant, Hunted, and Ascension. Since I hadn't read those in almost a decade I was a bit lost at times in remembering what Gardner was referencing.

The good thing is that if you like light space opera, then you'd find this series enjoyable enough to start at the beginning. Actually I'd like to reread "Expendable" at some point but my copy pretty much disintegrated a while ago.

My real complaint is sometimes there was a little too much conversation. This sounds hypocritical because in my blog I have a few times complained how much I hate writing action scenes. But a little less hypothesizing and a little more finding out what things were would have been nice.

Still, like the rest of the series it's light enough to make it a quick read. Recommended if you like "Star Trek" or similar fare. It's too bad that there don't seem to be more of these forthcoming, but "Radiant" makes for a good ending while leaving things open for the future.

That is all.

_Radiant_ is yet another excellent installment in the League of Peoples books by James Alan Gardner, easily one of the best if not the best. I would recommend reading the other books in the series first but if one doesn't I don't believe it would be too confusing.

Unlike some of the more recent volumes, particularly _Trapped_, our heroine of the entire series, Admiral Festina Ramos, has a major starring role almost from the beginning. True to form to the other volumes however the narrator is a person that that book has introduced. Our other hero this time around is a member of the Explorer Corps as well, a woman by the name of Youn Suu from the planet Anicca, a Buddhist planet settled by people from Southeast Asia. Like other members of the Explorer Corps, her brilliant mind, a non-hazardous and non-handicapping deformity, and her lack of acceptance of society drove her into the Explorer Corps.

At the start of the book Youn Suu is serving on the Technocracy ship _Pistachio_ with her Explorer Corp partner, Tut (a remarkable and unique individual). The ship is dispatched to free a Cashling planet (the Cashling being a whiney, can-barely-do-anything-for-themselves, hedonistic species introduced earlier in the series) from the Balrog, an enigmatic, powerful alien that superficially resembles red moss but known by Festina and others to be incredibly intelligent, calculating, and powerful. The red moss has thoroughly engulfed one of the Cashling cities, a place by the name of Zoonau, leading the aliens to scream for protection from the Technocracy. Knowing that the Balrog won't knowingly harm let alone kill anyone, its massive presence is nonetheless unwelcome. The _Pistachio_ is dispatched to deal with the situation.

It soon turns out that the Balrog were basically acting as they did, when and where they did, to engineer so that both Youn Suu and Festina Ramos would be at the same place and at the same time along with the Balrog, both being needed to deal with a far greater crisis; a request to rescue colonists on the world of Muta, a world being explored and tentatively settled by the Technocracy's chief rival, the Unity. The world was once known to have been inhabited by the Fuentes (also introduced earlier in the series), a race that around the human year 4000 BC ascended to a god-like non-corporeal form, having destroyed virtually all traces of their civilization, their buildings, structures, roads, everywhere they existed. Except on Muta.

The planet attracted first one race known as the Greenstriders, a race - in a move very much out of character for the species - that sold the planet to the Unity. Something it seems had not only scared the Greenstriders into selling this world (they were otherwise never, ever known to part with land once they acquired it) but also destroyed apparently in a matter of seconds every single Unity outpost. All contact was lost and attempts to reestablish it had not been successful.

What caused their sudden disappearance (all the more remarkable when a survey from orbit reveals no physical destruction to their campsites)? Festina, Youn Suu, and Tut investigate, uncovering the answers to mysteries both ancient and modern. There is lots of action in the book, more than in some of the earlier volumes, and the mystery that unfolds in _Radiant_ ties into larger issues of the history and cosmology of the League of Peoples universe.

This I think is the arguably the best book of the series, much better than the earlier volume _Trapped_. Gardner continues to impress me as a writer and I hope that others discover him as well.

In the previous books (Expendable, Ascending, etc) I found Festina to be smart, couragous and likeable. In this book, what are her accomplishments?

1) She breaks the legs of a partner she distrusts when the partner comes to ask for Festina's help in rescuing another explorer. Festina does this without asking one question about why she is there.

2) Festina unplugs a machine.

I was undershelmed. Oh yea, she also fought a dinosaur well. This is not the Festina I miss from the other books. I also found the main character to be a bit on the "feel sorry for myself" side.

"Radiant," James Alan Gardner's latest in his "Expendable" Universe (the Expendables are disposable members of the explorer corps who are flawed aesthetically and whose lives are therefore less valued), is a blend of the standard "survey-team in trouble" story with a riff on the nature of the hero, as contrasted in Western and Eastern cultures. Gardner has a great idea: as he says in his introduction: "I'm tired of melting-pot futures where all the cultural differences have been homogenized into some lukewarm vanilla snooze."

"Radiant" is anything but that, with its two heroines, Youn Suu (representing the Buddhist East) and Festina Ramos (representing the cowboy West). And then there's the bizarrely annoying holy fool Tut, the jester with a thousand faces.

But you don't need a PhD to enjoy "Radiant." There's plenty of action, as the explorers have to figure out what happened on a world suddenly deserted. Prodded along by the presence of the Balrog, a mosslike hive-mind culture, the explorers, who turn out to be far from expendable, find the answer, and Mr. Gardner expands the limits of contemporary sf.