Customer Reviews

Vixen (Cosmos)

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

In the far future, a ship of religious fundamentalists en route to a new world run into an unexplained phenomenon that may shatter their preconceptions of the universe. The first novel from Bud Sparhawk is SF for adults who like to think -- about religion, the future, the universe. Recommended.

Colonists awake as their sleeper ship, Covenant, approaches its destination; the specialists and technicians aboard will prepare the planet Meridian for the waves of colonists that will follow. As they activate the long-dormant systems and begin preparations for establishing their new home, they learn that they are not alone. And since their expedition originated on a planet called Heaven, sent by their religious leader known as the Hand of God, learning that beings more ancient and powerful than Man already inhabit the system may cause a crisis of faith and tear apart their heavily caste-dependent social system.

Vixen explores the colonists' motivations and the difficulties of their caste-centric society against a well-conceived hard SF backdrop. The future religious order is presented with great care and detail, including the foibles that make even the most pious susceptible to temptation. One such object of temptation is the source of the title, and that to me was the greatest disappointment: the girl called a "vixen," one of the lower castes produced by the selective breeding program, influenced the action but was not one of the main characters, yet the novel's title had led me to believe more would come of that storyline.

Bud does a good job getting inside the heads of his characters and showing the heights of their devotion as well as the depths of their depravity. The mysterious ships that harass Covenant from the cloud-shrouded gas giant planet were reminiscent of the powerful Hydrogue vessels in Kevin J. Anderson's Saga of the Seven Suns series, and remained mysterious even when one of the main characters made a fateful jump onto one of the vessels. But more compelling to me than the alien presence itself was the way Bud treated the difficulties the human scientists and religious leaders had in dealing with an obviously advanced species. The entire Covenant mission was based on the humans' sincere belief that Man was the highest form of life in the universe, having been specially placed at the pinnacle of existence by God; I enjoyed seeing how the new realization of Man's place in the universe affected the different characters.

(Full Disclosure: I know Bud Sparhawk, and have appeared on panels with him at SF&F conventions.)

Poor characterization. Unresolved conflict. Stupid main characters. Read at your own risk.

Three months after the above line was written:
I just read the review in the November 2009 Analog. Don Sakers and I must have read different versions of this novel, or his BS quotient is much lower than mine. He seems to like it. I stand by my review.

This book starts as an interesting story of slower then light interstellar colonization. This is rather refreshing in an era when virtual reality psychedelics, post-singularity stories and vampire romances. This is the sort of sci fi that first made me interested in sci fi.

However, we eventually learn the characters do NOT come from anything remotely resembling 20th century America. Instead, they come from a religious fundamentalist, racist, slave owning society. This society is fairly well explained, but the unpleasantness of the society doing the colonizing takes away some of my interest in how things turn out. There is a "sexploitation" plot. In the end there is a "post singularity" element after all.

Personally, I wish the book dealt with the mechanic of interstellar colonization more. That was the best part of the book, in my opinion.

On the whole, it's good because it did something slightly different then what is popular in sci fi now.