Customer Reviews

The Tower and the Hive (Rowan)

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(17)
3 star:		(15)
2 star:		(10)
1 star:		(13)

 

 

I have been engrossed in the lives of Anne McCaffery's various characters since I first read Dragon Song at the age of twelve. Fortunately, The Tower and the Hive is not the first book by her that I have read. The book lacks any sense of a cohesive plot and is filled with tedious narratives...I am not sure why I even bothered to finish the entire book!

This was a wonderful story. Learning a little more about the Dini's was great but this book could have been better. When I first read the promo for this book I thought it would be about the threats that the Rowan and Raven would be receiving and the actual attack on them. To my disappointment the actual attack took less than a chapter. Plus the ending could really have used some help. I mean the idea was great but to have everything hinge on a man that has never been in any of the other books, that was a little hard to accept. The development of the relationship between Laria and Kincade was cool, but the rest of the odd characters and side stories would have to be explained and it was evident Anne wanted to move on to other stories. I liked this book, it answered some questions and brought some ending to sections of the story line but it also raised other questions and brought in new story lines that could be explored. Over all a good book, but it did not meet all expectations.

I am an Anne McCaffrey fan and have all her books and although this won't be in my list of top ten books; it is still a good read. It does continue the story begun by Rowan and it does tie up some loose ends. Personally, I thought the pheromone solution was quite ingenious!

*To Ride Pegasus* and *Pegasus in Flight* were the two first books I read by Anne McCaffrey. I thought they were wonderful. When I found *The Rowan* I read it as fast as I could; the same with *Damia* and *Damia's Children.* By the time I got to *Lyon's Pride,* I was slowing down a bit. Or else, Ms. McCaffrey was. I prefer to believe it was her, because I can still read the first books and love them as much as before.

I read *The Tower and the Hive* because I had so much enjoyed the stories of the Rowan and Damia that I wanted to know what happened to their children, and not so much because I was interested in the children themselves. Which is a shame. The story here is obviously a continuation of what happened in *Lyon's Pride.* Very little that is new is introduced. The characters and their relationships are not as developed as in previous books; mostly, you must rely on what you remember from those stories to get any feeling of family dynamics.

The short of it is, I only made it all the way through this book because I wanted to know what happened to Damia and the Rowan (who only make cameo appearances in this book). To use a movie analogy, I felt a little like I went to see a two-hour documentary on insect pheromones, just because I knew there was a 5 second comment made by my favorite Hollywood actress.

Who really wrote this book? I have to wonder if Todd McCaffrey didn't in fact write this.
That's the only explanation I can come up with for her having seemed to forget her characters so completely.
I just finished reading the whole Talent series back to back and the difference between those books and this is striking.
What happened? I have been wondering what the deal is with her allowing her son Todd to tinker with Pern, the results of which you can read about in other reviews here on this site. Suffice it to say, they have not been a roaring success.
I personally think he had a large hand in this one, even if he received no credit for it. Why?

After 5 years with no sequel, all of a sudden she decides to come back, like with Skies of Pern and just like that book, this one has some major problems. For example, the woodenness, the unfamiliarity of all the characters we have come to love from the last 4 books. The characters just feel all wrong, almost like in fanfic when someone tries hard to emulate the original, but is just too self aware.

What about the Rowan? She makes glorified cameos, along with Damia and Afra. And frankly, they were the only reasons I kept reading this book. But they don't appear all that much and the reader is left with the boring personalities of their cookie-cutter children.
The once interesting and vibrant characters in the first novels have been radically changed, as if McCaffrey did indeed forget them. In this book, Afra is described as being `methody' when in fact the entire background of the Damia novel was all about him NOT being methody, which was why he had to leave Capella. Jeff Raven is now a Peter Reidinger clone, shamelessly manipulating his horde of offspring and heavily pressuring them to accept outposts on planets light years away from family and friends. The Rowan is somewhere in the background there. She has one or two paragraphs, but not much else. What happened to the Jeff Raven who wanted to rebel? Or even the Rowan for that matter.

My other misgivings about this so-called `ending' are these:

1. The plot meanders all over the place. I mean, why is the Hiver Queen now into her third book of incarceration, and no one has a clue how to talk to her yet? Zara was supposed to be the liaison with godlike gifts of empathy, but she goes on to other things and never comes in contact with the Hiver Queen again. Later they attribute her understanding of the Queen's distress as having been just chance. Now, this is the first break with canon that got my attention and why I think someone other than McCaffrey had a hand in writing this thing. You may recall, that Zara felt the pain of the Queen from several light years away, and when she got close, she immediately understood that she was freezing to death. The continuity error here is a step beyond the shoddily written intro where Afra is listed as being Damia's brother, for Pete's sake. This is just a straight cop out, and if they didn't want to write any more, they would have been better off not bothering at all. Of course, there's no money in that, is there?

2.The other children and their significant others go from one planet to the other, hypothesizing and theorizing about Hiver biology, when what the reader wants to know is: What happened to so and so --? And it just goes on and on, along with the ridiculous subplot of developing birth control methods for the `Dinis. The final answer of how to talk with the Hivers is very contrived and
goes against earlier canon. Uh, why weren't the pheromones detected in Damia's Children when Zara pulled her `antic'? Why didn't the Queen react to Zara's pheromones? You might remember she stank so badly, she was rushed into the showers, and yet in the Tower and Hive, the mere hint of garlic caused a Hiver to react to cleanse the air. It's all just nonsense. Forget writing the
Biology textbook for the 24th century, this story was always about the PEOPLE and I think the communication thing with the Hivers could have been so much more interesting . . . as in, what if they are Telepathic in some new way? That would have explained why Zara could hear her all those light years away and the instantaneous communication from the Queen to her workers.
Pheromones take time, because they require air. And air, even in a hurricane, can only go so fast.

3. Damia's children. To the last man (or woman) they are absolutely perfect. They don't gripe about working full time jobs from the time they are 12 or so and don't seem to want to rebel against their grandfather's unceasing demands as well as his schemes to turn them all into baby factories. They don't seem to mind being bred like cattle. In addition, we are left at the end of the book knowing that they will all be searching for Hiver worlds forever on board navy vessels in order to drop the pheromones on them. For years and years and years. And I thought my job was bad.

4. No interesting characters. The one possibility, Vagrian, is given more time in the book than the Rowan or Damia but turned out to be a red herring. Why did they bring in this character? He adds nothing to the story and once he is mind-fixed, has no other purpose. Why did McCaffrey introduce us to him, if he doesn't do anything important? He doesn't even seduce one of her available daughters, so there's no reason for him to be in the story. You begin to wonder if there wasn't more planned for that character McCaffrey
(or Todd) just lost steam and tied it all up.

5. That's yet another problem. Too many pat answers, the most glaring of which is the Laria/Kincaid relationship. Now, why go to all the trouble to reinforce that the man is gay in the other books, and then just have him forget all that and become straight just for her.
Because he loves her? It doesn't work that way. So now, we are left with their very implausible relationship and of course her entry into the halls of baby making. How about a female Talent that -gasp!- chooses not to have ANY babies! Now that might be a good story.

So, we are finally left with an incomplete and hurried story, up to an including the Final Solution for the Buggers -I mean Hivers.
(Wouldn't want Orson Scott Card to get mad or anything.) What made these books so great was the concept of Talent combined with the interesting personalities. From Rhyssa Owen to Damia, even Jeff Raven before his character got ruined. It would have been better not to end it like this, but leave it with the open ended finale in Lyon's Pride.

When I was reading "The Tower and the Hive" I did not know it was intended to be the last volume in Anne McCaffrey's Talent series. Ideally I like to read a book without looking at what is on the dust jacket or hearing too much publicity; this is not always possible, granted, but I had picked up McCaffrey's book because it was part of the series and finally got around to reading it without hearing this was the end. Ironically, my primary feeling while reading "The Tower and the Hive" was not that McCaffrey was wrapping things up, but rather that she was setting something up for down the road. My mistake.

The Humans and their Mrdini allies are still trying to find a way to deal with the Hiver menace. At the center of this effort are the Talented members of Federation Teleport and Telepath, especially those belonging to the Gwyn-Raven dynasty founded by the Rowan (of whom there is far too little). McCaffrey provides an introduction, "What Has Gone On Before," that will serve as an involved reminder for those who have been following the series but which will undoubtedly confuse newcomers who stumble on the book by accident, not knowing it is part of a series. I resisted the idea that "The Tower and the Hive" was about solving the Hiver problem, although the title is certainly a big clue in that direction. In retrospect, this book is essentially a collection of sub-plots involving "Lyon's Pride" the children of Afra Lyon and Damia, the Rowan's daughter: Laria finds love, Zara deals with the problem of Mrdini reproduction, and Thian is out with the fleet investigating strange Hiver worlds. At one point I thought the character of Vagrian Beliakin was going to shake-up things big time, but that proved not to be the case, and I am wondering if there is some subtle message to someone with the pivotal role played by Pierre Laney's unique talent in the novel's climax.

Ultimately, I think the value of "The Tower and the Hive" is not as a culmination to the Talent Saga, but how the book stands in contrast to other noted science fiction sagas dealing with bug aliens, specifically Robert Heinlein's "Starship Troopers" and Orson Scott Card's "Ender's Game." Whether this is intentional or not on the part of the author, the comparisons seem both inevitable and fruitful. McCaffrey has always showed a talent for creative problem solving, which is one of the key elements at the heart of both the Talent and Pern series, so I would not dismiss her biological solution to interstellar warfare as mere pacifism. We should be mindful of the author's intended message when we notice that this series ends not with a big bang, but with a gentle fall of rain.

I usually enjoy most of Anne McCaffrey's books, but not this one! There were too many characters to get involved in the plot personally. The way to solve both the Dini breeding problem and the Hiver problems just wasn't--original. I hate to spoil this for you, but come one--pheremones that they just happen to stumble upon! She's written better.

The Rowan/Damia series, has to date been wonderful. But not here! In an ending I describe as "throw the material from two books into one and finish it up" this book looks VERY rushed, pushed and uncomfortable with itself. What a shame to end the series on such a note. People and events are refered to out of context to such an extent that you reread earlier parts of the book to make sure the pages aren't missing.

If you've read the previous books, then the first quarter gets very repetitive, continually recapping on the past story, as already explained in the preface!

The characters are mainly as in Lyon's Pride - and the few new ones are not well developed. The plotting against FT&T doesn't come to much. And who does "The Nose" think he is? - claiming the credit for the pheremone solution - though that solution seemed pretty weak!

Basically it would be nice if AnneMcCaffrey would rewrite completely! There could have been some good plots and twists, much better than actually occured.

However, all said and done, McCaffrey is still a good read.

I have enjoyed this great book immensely, I found it very hard to put down, but it left too many loose ends and did not close of the series in a way that is satisfying. It would have been good to see a new FT & T rise strong from its past, with a new charter that includes cooperation with the military, but that didn't happen. The Hiver problem also doesn't feel completely finished, what happens if a really smart queen figures out what is going on and manages to avoid 'the treatment'. I hope that McCaffrey will change her mind and write another novel, because I know that there is a lot of room for another one. This book is well worth the read, don't let comments like mine put you off, because it is a fast ride that will leave you gasping from Hiver stench, and crying in triumph as Laria and Rojer finally find their feet.