Rogue Berserker (Mass Market Paperback)

~ (Author) "The tall thing with four arms came close to catching Harry Silver with its first three-legged rush at him in the dark I alley..." (more)
Key Phrases: tame robot, chewing pod, assassin machine, Winston Cheng, Harry Silver, Lady Masaharu (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

Even those who have lost count of Saberhagen's Berserker novels should applaud this one. Rogue pilot Harry Silver is hired by a wealthy magnate to retrieve the magnate's abducted wife and daughter. One of Silver's archrivals, the pilot Satranji, is also part of the scheme, as is a naval architect who has devised a fast scout ship that looks exactly like one of the smaller berserkers. Ideal for penetrating berserker-held space, this ship is not the only oddity in Harry's path. Others include an assassin machine sent by Berserker High Command to terminate a rogue berserker, a sex-surrogate robot, the aforementioned rogue berserker, and the abduction of Harry's own family. After much fast action during which characterizations and hardware remain well balanced, Harry gets his family back, but the rogue berserker, which kidnapped them for research on humans, is still on the loose. Substantial rewards for sophisticated and longtime Berserker fans. Roland Green
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Product Description

Harry Silver has already had a lifetime of trouble from ordinary Berserkers, the automated killing machines programmed an age ago to denude the galaxy of life. Now when his own family is kidnapped, he faces a deviant machine, a good fit for some or all of the Galactic Dictionary's definitions of ROGUE:

ROGUE: (1) A deceitful, double-dealing evildoer .. . (4) A fierce elephant or stamodont that has been banished from the herd . . . (10) Having a peculiarly malevolent or unstable nature . . . (11) No longer loyal, affiliated, or recognized, and hence not governable or accountable . . . erring, apostate. - Galactic Dictionary of the Common Tongue

Ordinary Berserkers armed with weapons powerful enough to kill an entire planet were enough of a nightmare. What worse deviltry will a killing machine gone rogue attempt-and even if Silver can stop it, will he ever see his family alive again?

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Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 384 pages
• Publisher: Baen (May 23, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1416520694
• ISBN-13: 978-1416520696
• Product Dimensions: 6.7 x 4.1 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #214,480 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Tightly written, full of the unexpected, March 2, 2005

By	Patrick J. Callahan (La Crosse, WI USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Rogue Berserker (Berserker Series) (Hardcover)

This novel is more tightly written than some of Saberhagen's other Berserker novels -- more concise and faster moving. The plotting is really skillful. Under the experienced pen of the author, the plot of this book "turns around" to bite the reader in an almost shocking way.

Saberhagen "sets up" the reader from the first page with lots of scattered evidence that is subject to lots of interpretation. The bare facts are these: women and children have been kidnapped by the berserkers. As Harry Winston and his boss Winston Cheng puzzle over the evidence, weighing facts against facts, they work out a pretty sound theory of what has happened and why. Using their assumptions, Harry and Cheng assemble a team and devise a plan to rescue the hostages. The whole rescue mission, which is at the center of the book, is based upon this reconstruction of what really happened. Who did the kidnappings? Why? What will become of the hostages? Where were they taken?

In this respect, the novel takes on some of the suspense of a good mystery novel. And yet the author wisely plants some seeds of doubt. Harry Silver's logic wars with his instincts. "That HAS to be what happened . . . but it somehow doesn't 'smell' right." Have Harry and Cheng built a house of cards?

A blur of shocking and violent events bursts upon the reader at the end of Chapter 12 -- about two-thirds of the way through the book. As Lawrence Durrell once put it, "take but a step to the east or the west and the entire picture changes." It turns out that every key assumption of Silver and Chang was WRONG.

As weapons blaze, as his friends are dying, and as his installation is being blown apart, Harry realizes with a kind of horror that his whole picture -- everything -- was based on wrong interpretations. Some of his brothers in arms, on whom he was depending, turn out to be arch-villains, and the berserkers whom he thought he understood are acting in inexplicable ways, beyond anything Harry could have expected. Furthermore, the hostages are not where everyone assumed they were. The kidnappers are not the ones that everyone "knew" were guilty. Lastly, characters who up until now have seemed inconsequential and even silly suddenly become key and central players in the novel.

The author has managed all of this so skillfully. The plotting is almost brilliant. It is like one of those "gestalt" drawings where a picture seems to change from a lady's hat to a duck. The author takes the same evidence and lays it out in a different pattern. And, suddenly everything is up for grabs.

Harry improvises, recruiting the most improbable allies, making it up as he goes along.

When he blasts his way finally into the fortress and releases the hostages, one of them says, "where are all the others? The other rescuers?" Harry said, "I'm it. There's no one else. I'm the only one that's still alive." What a story!

The characters are marvelous. The book is full of robots or androids of one type or another, and a number of interesting human characters as well. Even though "we all know" that berserkers are unreflective killing machines, you will be surprised to find a few in this book who behave in the most extraordinary ways, reinterpreting their prime directive to make the most aberrant actions seem "logical." Motivation of these berserkers is crafted as skillfully as in Issac Asimov's masterpiece "The Naked Sun."

Saberhagen sometimes evokes Asimov. Asimov's robots relied upon their 'positronic' brains. Saberhagen's rely on their 'optelectronic' brains. Both Asimov and Saberhagen have so much fun warping and parsing their robotic "prime directives." The reader thinks, "robots can't act that way." but -- they can! They do! Because they think in their OWN eerie way!

Heck-- just READ IT. It's about as good as a shoot-em-up space novel is ever going to get.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Decent and Modern Berserker Story, September 11, 2006

By	Stewart Teaze (San Diego, CA United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Rogue Berserker (Berserker Series) (Hardcover)

Rogue Berserker (2005) is a Better-Than-Average Berserker tale. While we aren't presented with any really new kinds of technology in this book - there are a couple of twists on how technology is used/misused by the humans and their evil machine (Berserker) enemies, which are fairly interesting... for example, both the humans and berserkers resort to disection and experimentation on captured prisoners - of course, it is OK that we do it, because the berserker are "evil machines who can't fell anything, and who are out to exterminate life from the Galaxy".

Harry Silver is the hero of the story, but he is not a very likeable guy... and when his family gets kidnapped, he becomes even more surly, yet obsessed to "get even" with the berserkers who are evidently behind the disappearnce of his family.

Another interesting plot twist are the actions/adventures of the female android, used by one of the antogonists in the tale... she provides an interesting side-story throughout the book, and in the end, winds up having to make some interesting decisions.

The story rates 3.5 stars (rounded up to 4).

5.0 out of 5 stars The last Berserker novel..., June 29, 2009

By	Michael Valdivielso (Alexandria, VA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

Harry Silver, a repeating character in the last few of the Berserker books, finally gets to be in a good book. When a Berserker kidnaps the daughter and grandson of a very rich, very powerful Winston Cheng, Harry is asked to help rescue them. He refuses. Then his own wife and son are kidnapped and the only way to save them is to join Winston on a suicide run against a unknown Berserker base. Harry thought the plan, to try to sneak in using a secret weapon was insane and, at best, would get them all killed.
He was wrong. Very, very wrong. This was not just some normal, death dealing, Berserker. This was a rogue, see the title, and it had plans of its own. And it was being hunted not just by men but by the Berserkers also.
About two thirds through the novel you get a surprise and the action really goes into overdrive. This novel is swift, clean, exciting and has Berserkers all over the place. It almost makes up for such slow novels as Berserker Fury, Shiva In Steel, and Berserker Star.