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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Finely-Written Entertainment,
By Allie Kat "sarahphin" (Nunavut) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Skinner (Paperback)
I'm leery of tales that combine elements associated with fantasy (dragons, in this case) with those of sci-fi. However, it's very credibly done here. On a colonized planet of the future, Chavez Blackstone runs afoul of the ruling elite, the First-Wavers, and is forced into taking the dangerous job of hunting dragons on a neighboring barren planet. Intersecting his story of survival is a depiction of the corporations and the First-Wavers who own them. The quality of the writing, the attention to detail, and the pacing of the book are all strong. The characters are well-developed and the dialogue, which can be a pit-fall for many writers, was a pleasant surprise.
4.0 out of 5 stars
A fine mix of politics, economics, and action,
By
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Skinner (Paperback)
Skinner is the third (and, apparently, the last) novel in Richard McEnroe's Far Stars and Future Times series. There is an ad in the novel's back pages for a fourth book titled Chains of Knowledge, but it isn't included in McEnroe's bibliography and I've found no evidence that it was ever published.
Skinner begins on the planet Wolkenheim, where most of the action in Flight of Honor (the second book in the series) takes place. The Earth emigrants who settled Wolkenheim (the First Wavers) have implemented a scheme to make sure their hard-won prosperity isn't supplanted by newly arriving immigrants: anyone setting foot on Wolkenheim who can't establish his financial solvency is forced into indentured servitude -- serving, of course, the First Wavers. Chavez Blackstone has been scraping by on Wolkenheim, but after engaging in a drunken brawl with a member of the power structure, he's declared insolvent. He seeks off-world passage from ship's captain Moses Callahan, a character in The Shattered Stars (the first book in the series), but before he can make his escape he's captured and taken to the planet Trollshulm where he's put to work for the powerful Santer Family. The Santers make their living by producing dragonskin, a fabric that comes from dragons that are native to Trollshulm. The dragons are docile creatures until someone tries to kill them, which is the difficult job given to skinners -- and Blackstone's new vocation. Seamlessly merging with the main plot is a story of economic and political intrigue as Eli Santer fights to save his fabric monopoly from a competing product, from a disloyal employee, and from new flight technology that will undermine his way of doing business. Joining the two plotlines is a woman who works for (and sleeps with) Santer, who feels compassion for the skinners he economically enslaves. Political machinations run through the story, but politics and economics take a back seat to the action, making Skinner a very readable novel. It's almost as good as Flight of Honor, although it feels like it was written a bit hastily, as if McEnroe had to cut some corners to meet a deadline. Still, Skinner is a worthwhile, intelligent read for sf fans. It's unfortunate that McEnroe didn't continue the series beyond the three fine novels that he produced.
0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Sci-Fi for Commodities Broker,
By
This review is from: Skinner (Orbit Books) (Paperback)
The book starts out ok about Chavez Blackstone who is forced into indentureship to kill and skin dragons for their hide by the rulling elite. Then it departs into some subplots about a ship captain of the startship Flute and corporate trading of an alternate synthetic fabric better then dragon skins. These subplots never really merge with the Blackstone plot which only makes up about half the book and ends up just being a confusing mess. One chapter your reading about Blackstone then the next chapter in flips back to the commodites trading.
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