Uncharted Stars by Andre Norton a review

Uncharted Stars by Andre Norton

Uncharted Stars is the superior sequel to the Zero Stone and continues the adventures of Murdoc Jern, itinerant jewel dealer and his companion, Eet the mysterious mutant born from a ship’s cat. Eet is not merely a mutant but is the reincarnation of an alien from the time of the Forerunners ancient and powerful aliens long gone from the spaceways.

Jern had obtained a Zero Stone, an artifact of the Forerunners, as an inheritance from his father. The elder Jern was the owner of a pawn shot in a spaceport but is revealed to have been a retired VIP (Veep) in the quasi government of the Thieves Guild. Jern's father collected more than gems and curiosities- he collected secrets and mysteries. One of these, the Zero Stone, cost him his life and set his adopted son wandering the stars, looking for answers.

Zeros stones are sources of power augmenting any ship or weapon they touch. Murdoc learns this in the first book as he is pursued across space by both the Guild and the Space Patrol. At the end of the first book Jern and Eet have won a truce with the Patrol, escaping imprisonment with a reward and a single small zero stone.

Jern and Eet purchase a small ship, with a pilot of dubious character and set off hunting zero stones while trying to make a living off of lesser gems. In this they are frustrated by the fact that the Patrol still lists them as criminals and the Guild still hunts them. Their initial successes come to nothing against this institutional hostility, they are driven further and further into the shadows and closer to the Guild.

But a chance encounter with pirates and a massacred expedition of archeologists put Eet, Jern and their pilot on a course into the depths of space, to the fabled pirate base of Waystar, in the company of a Zacathan scholar they rescued. The lizard being is of an old and honored race still not evolved when the Forerunners roamed space but who hold most of the galaxy’s history in trust and pursue knowledge for its own sake. At Waystar, Jern poses as his father, the former Thieves Guild Veep, to recover a bowl that is actually a star map, showing the homeworld of the Zero Stones.

After many narrow escapes the small expedition heads to that lost and forbidden world and a date with living history.


The Pros: As with the Zero Stone- Norton’s description of gems and gem lore seduces us. There are times that we almost resent the main plot line dragging us away from the various gem-trading expeditions Jern takes us on. We learn to love the flame-tipped zorans and revel in the adventure where we acquire the fabled greenstones of the ice-world. Norton's galaxy doesn’t merely serve the plot line. It is rich and varied and we feel these worlds have their own fascinating histories. We wish we could turn aside and study them more. It’s like a good dinner that tantalizes the pallet but does not quite fill the stomach, leaving us wanting a little more. We sense sometimes that we are on the edge of adventures of other characters that we meet, notably on the ice-world, and that their adventures are as desperate and meaningful to them as Jern’s is to him.

Waystar, the pirate hold is well and vividly described. With its outer shell of dead and looted ships, it’s a place to haunt the imagination.

Yes it is the burgeoning relationship between Eet and Jern, with its highs and lows, its silences, angers and devotion that is the heart of this novel. Jern is determined not to be junior partner in that relationship, despite Eet’s powers and encyclopedic knowledge. The nature of this relationship will be so obvious to you in retrospect, after the big reveal, that you will wonder how you didn’t see this coming.


The Cons: Not many. The book could be longer and more detailed. Norton was not a scientist or a physicist, she never really troubles herself about how any technology works. She has a tendency to hang an “er” on any bit of machinery: blaster, flitter, reader etc.
Sex and sexuality are largely absent from her work, though in this case… well, I will let that be a bit of a surprise.

In sum, Uncharted Stars is the quintessential Norton and loses nothing to being a YA book. I give 9 of 10 stars to this work.

The cover of this old hardbacked version is one of my favorties though the Zacathan looks more like the Jolly Green Giant's cousin than the Gorn-like creature I had envisioned.

By Edward McKeown

Zero Stone by Andre Norton (1958) review

Zero Stone by Andre Norton (1958)

Zero Stone opens with a man fleeing for his life down the darkened alleys of a primitive alien city. He’s a Terran, younger half of a team of jewel dealers. His partner has been murdered when the priests of an alien religion, in an unheard of act, select an off-worlder for a sacrifice and are answered with lasers. His partner dead, Murdoc Jern flees to an alien sanctuary and uses his store of jewels to bribe his way to a Free Trader space freighter and escape offworld.

But it is not an escape, a net is being drawn around Jern. The net has spanned the gulfs of interstellar space as the Thieves Guild reaches out in search of the Zero Stone, an ancient and mysterious artifact that is Jern’s prize possession, a heritage from his father.

Jern’s father was a passionate collector of jewels, secrets and mysteries, particularly those associated with the ancient and long disappeared races called the Forerunners. These aliens reached incredible heights of technology ages ago before disappearing, destroyed in wars or leaving space-time for unguessed of destinations. The Jerns are perfectly positioned to learn these secrets positioned in a “hock-lock” (pawnshop) near a spaceport.

Murdoc’s world collapses around him after a particular stone is brought into the shop, a colorless, lifeless lump on a large ring. It is a zero stone, an artifact from the time of the Forerunners, found on a drifting spacesuit and alien corpse. With the stone comes the death of Jern’s father after a mysterious meeting with an offworlder. Jern learns his father was a former Veep (VIP) retired from the shadowing quasi-government of the Thieves Guild. Now that Guild has reached out for the Zero Stone. Bur the killers do not find the stone, which Murdoc takes from his father’s hidden safe.

Other blows fall. Jern learns from his mother that he is a contract child, a test-tube baby decanted on this world for genetic diversity. His “mother” makes it clear that his younger brother, her natural child, is to inherit all. Jern who has always and only been his father’s son has never cared for either mother or brother. He leaves to become apprenticed to Vondar Ustle a master jeweler with wanderlust. They journey and trade in a life Jern comes to love before it ends in a dagger thrust in an alien bar.

The Free Trader Jern escapes in, lands on various worlds. On one, the ship’s cat eats what appears to be a stone from a riverbed. Days later the cat is pregnant. The spacers, fearing, some alien contagion, isolate the beast which gives birth to an oddly shaped mutant. But it is more than that. The mutant is something ancient, reborn, powerfully intelligent, armed with telepathic ability and knowledge of things Forerunner. Jern falls ill with what seems a fever. The crew’s fears are confirmed. They are determined to kill both Jern and the mutant.

Jern, delirious and suggestible, follows the voice in his head and escapes with the mutant out into space protected only by a spacesuit and with a container holding the mutant. Then the Zero Stone ring plays a part. It begins to glow and drags the pair through deep space to the site of an ancient forerunner wreck where they find an operational lifeboat.

Jern’s recovery is abrupt. The illness was a telepathic manipulation by the mutant who calls itself Eet. It learned that the Free Traders were actually Thieves Guild from the minds of the crew. It knew that they were responsible for killing Jern's partner and planned to deliver Jern to their bosses. Eet also knows of the Zero stone and its almost limitless power.

The pair are forced into an alliance to fight for their lives and freedom when they land on an unknown world where there is a store of Zero Stones. They are caught between the Thieves Guild and the Space Patrol in a battle for possession of the ancient artifacts.


The Pros: The relationship with Eet is the strength of this book. Maddening and intriguing, Eet is a recreation of a Forerunner, a personality hidden in the seed eaten by the freighter ship’s cat. Smug, superior and yet somehow endearing, Eet is full of surprises.
As Jern plunges ahead on his own adventure, he touches those of others. These alien worlds, cultures and peoples are not mere devices but are rich and complex and we sometimes want to turn aside and spend more time exploring them. This is also true of the gem lore, the little we learn makes us fascinated, even covetous, the gems begin to wink in our minds, sensuous and seductive.

The Cons: Andre Norton’s books are usually devoid of sex and sexuality and Zero Stone is no exception. One sometimes hungers for a little higher degree of complexity or sophistication which with Norton simply is not there. Dialogue is sometimes clumsy with odd turns of phrase such as “my hurt” as opposed to “my wound.”

The Space Patrol which in Andre Norton’s books is a combination of police force and navy is unsympathetically portrayed. The Patrolman they meet, Hory, is violently xenophobic, which seems odd in the pluralistic galaxy that Norton describes. However she develops this theme in other books in this shared universe, notably Last Planet, wherein the Patrol is rather isolated from Galactic life and human-dominated. When one realizes that the Zero Stone’s function is too make almost any machine or weapon more powerful, one can understand the Patrol’s desire to not leave such power in the son of a Thieves Guild Veep and an unknown mutant. Still Hory, the “double star” patrol agent (equivalent to a double-00 operative in James Bond’s universe) is a one note performance and without empathy or depth.

In sum, I love the book and forgive it the minor transgression above. There is high adventure and a fascinating universe to explore with pirates, ancient ruins, mysterious weapons and devices. Yes, it could use a green Orion slave girl or two.

Stay Tuned for the sequel “Uncharted Stars.” This is a rare case of the sequel being better than the original, rather like the second Terminator movie.

By Edward McKeown

Lawyers in Hell

My involvement in Lawyers in Hell came about as do many of my adventures in life, by way of my sense of humor. I was playing with Facebook one day trying to figure out if this was the biggest waster of human time since Rubik’s Cube or God’s gift to enterprising networkers (it’s both) when I chanced across Tempus Thales, the alter ego of Janet Morris. Having read a number of her anthologies and other works, I started corresponding by Facebook with her. Eventually the subject of the Heroes in Hell series came up. As a joke I told her that this field was not exhausted and that I could see room for many other volumes, especially Lawyers in Hell. Three of four rounds of bad lawyer jokes later she suddenly switched gears on me and sent “you’re on.” Next thing I knew this new anthology was taking off around my ears like the spaceship in “When Worlds Collide.”
I’d been in anthologies before and in fact edited two the Sha’Daa series which like the “In Hell” series has common premises and characters. However I was stunned by the wealth, depth and sheer complexity of the Hell series. A lot had come before and a lot more was subtext or implicit.
Well now that I had gotten myself into this I had a story to write. I started thinking of my own hellish experiences of the American legal process. No I am not a lawyer, nor do I play one on TV, but I have hired and fired my share of them, the latter is fun, sometimes they sob on their Gucci’s. I’d tell you what I do but then I would have to kill you. A quote came to me, that despite the wonders of the Internet I could not pin down, “Due Process is not endless process.” It occurred to me that if that was our goal on earth, in Hell it would be the opposite. So I came up with the idea of an appellate process in Hell and the appellate angel who served in it. The rest came fairly easy.
You might think that in hell “Due process would be a bullet” (Green Beret movie – thank you Internet) but I am sure it is a long and unending series of court dates, postponed motions, and indifference, in short much like the current Italian court system. If you think I am kidding, I was involved in a case of a traffic accident in Italy that was 25 years old when I inherited it, where half the parties had passed on due to to natural causes, and three years later when I left the case, it had no trial date set.
All kidding aside I have a great deal of respect for the legal profession. Rule of law beats the alternative, which is clubbing each other. And as for the lawyers themselves, lawyers don’t sue people, clients sue people, for coffee being too hot, toasters not being safe for bathtubs, and cars accelerating when they claim they are standing on the brake (they’re standing on the gas). Lawyers are a lot like guns, useful for good or evil, but you can’t blame a gun for shooting straight, or a lawyer for representing a wacky client. Well at least I don’t.
Have fun in Hell,
Best
Edward McKeown
http://www.sfreader.com/authors/edward-mcKeown

Betrayer by C J Cherryh

Betrayer by C J Cherryh (Spolier Alert!)
In my prior review of Deceiver I commented on how impossible it was to enter the series from that book because of the sheer weight of all that had gone before and how nobody should expect a writer to be able to do that. Then at the beginning of Betrayer, CJ Cherryh pretty much does so and makes it coherent and cogent with little evident effort. Drat.
Now that said, a summary is not a substitute for knowledge. If I told you War and Peace was essentially, “Napoleon invades Russia, goes badly” you’d have the essential plot, but so what? Even there you are starting with the information that most people, other than American college students know: Napoleon was French, Russia and France are countries and they fought a war with bright uniforms, tall hats, horses, cannons and a lot of snow. An SF writer has none of that built in and has to do all of that and not bore you. CJ succeeds though I still think a reader who had not read the earlier work will still be at sea, but maybe at least in sight of landfall.
Betrayer plunges us further into the battle to stabilize the Marid province and prevent most of the Atevi world from going up in a civil war that would threaten to destabilize the prospace, pro-human government of the Tabini and his human ally and lead diplomat, Bren Cameron. War among the Atevi is conducted within strict bounds as different groups of the Assassins Guild struggle against each other to carry out or prevent judicially approved Filings of Intent to Kill. The isolated human colony on its island of Mospheira is sitting this one out but in understandable nerves about anything that happens with the planet full of Atevi.
But the Guild itself has been split by the recent coup and counter coup against Tabini and many of the Pretender Murini’s Guild fled after Tabini’s return, to Marid province finding this nest of internecine family struggles, ripe fruit for the plucking. They insert themselves into existing plots and organize new ones, spreading conflict and unrest and having it blamed on Machigi the existing Marid clan chief, whose fall would allow them to essentially take over the clan from the inside. These Guild renegades would then own their own country.
Ilsidii, Tabini’s grandmother and power in her own right and ruthless cunning, believes Machigi is being set up. She had sent Cameron and his small but elite team of Guild guards into the Marid to settle the Deceiver Pauit in the first book and they now proceed to Mashcigi to establish relations with him. Cameron is Mashicigi and the Marid clan’s way out of the traps closing in on as the Guild frames Machigi for war crimes and the other Marid lords seek to replace him.
But the fires of conspiracy and rebellion outrace diplomatic efforts. Cameron and his team flee with Mashigi’s aid as a Guild-conducted purge of the rebel Guild explodes among conspirators and loyalists alike.
Isilidi and Cajeiri along with Barbara and Toby are besieged in Cameron’s home while Cameron must flee afoot through the badlands separating him from home and safety. Action and adventure abound in the second half of this book in sharp contrast to Deceiver.
My chief frustration remains how little we see of the love-interest (in itself the wrong word as the Atevi Jago has no word for love in her language) between Bren and Jago. There is a rich and unexplored field here. Bren and Jago are lovers, something of a scandal in itself. However we spend little time exploring this at all. Why would an Atevi woman begin this association (i.e. fall in love) with what to her is a Halfling? Jago is about eight and half feet tall, her father Bianchi seems to be about ten feet. You would think that the intimacies of relations between a giantess and a human might yield some moments of humor. Beyond that does anyone ever look askance at her for her relationship?
Imagine if you had a perfectly proportioned partner of another color who was still only three feet tall to your six foot or better? Would the world take so little notice or comment? Is she never embarrassed by it? In short, the difficulties inherent in an interracial relationship, much less an interspecies one seem glossed over. It doubtless helps if your girlfriend is a Guild assassin.
Another means of looking at this is the character of Barbara, Cameron’s ex-girlfriend and now his brother’s (an agent of the human government) girlfriend. Other than a tinge of jealously and contempt, Jago seems to have little reaction to her. How much more interesting could it have been if there were scenes between these two as they struggle to understand each other and Cameron.
Barbara as written is largely an emotional, grasping nuisance who seems somewhere between a stalker and normal jilted female character, but point is, she is a real human woman. She has love, affection, tears, kindness and on an instinctive level is the more rational choice for Bren, or could have been had she been expanded into three dimensions. Does Bren never long for a person who would understand him in a way no alien could? Never long for that comfort?
Don’t get me wrong. I am not dissing the character of Jago but rather wishing she had more of one and I had some access to it. She is the powerful ebony princess, always there and always at Cameron’s beck and call, for all that he defers to her in all matter of security. She is mysterious and deadly, but to me to the point of abstraction. Who are you, Jago? What do want and long for and why did it take the shape of Cameron? What does mother think of your new boyfriend? Do you ever dream of children? Will you know what to do if Cameron was crying by a graveside? What would you need from him if you stood over your father Bianchi’s grave and he was in there because he died protecting Cameron? All undiscovered country, but one that beckons.
Another area and this may just be the military geek in me, but when CJ does small unit actions, the running and gunning on the Guild level it is well done and plausible. There is a paucity of detail on the larger scale. Machigi for example comments that his people are a naval power. In a world that varies as wildly for levels of technology as does the Atevi one, I have no idea what that means: ironclads with steam power and Dahlgren guns yet still using sales, like the Abraham Lincoln in 20,000 leagues under the sea? Dreadnaughts of the WWI or II era? Or are we talking about armed fishing trawlers? It may seem odd with a space station and a starship above them but most Atevi live in the equivalent of our later 19th and very early 20th century.
Most of the fighting, which happens usually at the distance, is in deadly small unit scuffles between Guild. Occasionally one sees a mob of hunters or other militia. From the military point of view the war is rather confusing and devoid of detail. Do they have tanks, artillery? Do they operate in divisions, battalions or mere companies? The military of all sides again seems sketched rather than drawn.
Betrayer pumps up the action quotient and the fast cutting back and forth between Cameron’s point-of-view as he escapes Marid and Cajeiri as he juggles his deadly grandmother and his promise to Cameron to look after Barbara and Toby during the siege are compelling. When young Cajeiri ends up in combat for the first time, you are truly fearful for this brave little boy even if he is the size of Cameron and Toby.
Betrayer is a strong entry in this series, enjoyable in all respects. It features a well done Todd Lockwood cover, though not as good as the Whelan for Deceiver in my view. I would have enjoyed a more leisurely denouement with more scenes between the principals. Of course I also like the ending of the Lord of the Rings, so go figure. It’s probably a good thing that the ending leaves you wanting to see and hear a little more but in typical CJ fashion, when we wrap, we wrap damn fast.

Deceiver by C J Cherryh

Deceiver (Spoiler Alert!)
CJ Cherryh is the premier writer of what I think of as statecraft science-fiction. This is the stuff that occurs before the bullets start to fly that determines when they fly, how many of them fly and who they are aimed at. It’s what goes on before Seal Team Six is dispatched, though we do get to see some of the running and gunning, particularly when things go wrong or as John F Kennedy used to say, “Some dumb s.o.b doesn’t get the word.”
Deceiver is the 11th book of the Foreigner series that details the fate of a human colony after their ship becomes lost after a hyperspace jump. This isn’t the homogenous crew of the Enterprise but a divided crew that further divides when colonists seek to escape the grim life of the lost ship and the space station it created, literally parachuting to the world below. While the world is hospitable to human life, the local species the Atevi are less so. Not surprising, considering that humans literally tear the roof off their fairly stable high-medieval world.
Imagine the human colonists as Commodore Perry but with no backup, only the firepower at hand and divisions in their own forces and you have the situation. Conflict breaks out, more from misunderstanding than malice. The difference between how the species bond, humans with love and friendship, Atevi from man’chi, which seems a combination of “imprinting” and the desire to be associate upward to a powerful leader in a form of herd instinct.
Fast forward through the centuries to the present day, Bren Cameron is the Paidhi, the chief diplomat and advisor to the Tabini, the essential shogun of the fractious aishidi'tat that governs much of the planet. Humans hold their own continent island of Mosphiera and the Atevi hold the rest of the world. This apartheid has been arranged to preserve the Atevi culture, or at least slow down the rate of change to something they can handle and prevent further conflict which the outnumbered humans could lose.
The Atevi are humanoid aliens, far larger (I have seen reference material advising between 8 and 10 feet) and stronger than humans, with black skin and golden eyes. The cover art by the superb Michael Whelan conveys them very well, which is a relief as certain other covers made them look like large, angry Rastafarians. My personal preference is for the cover of Invader, which shows a more beautiful Jago and well illustrates the size discrepancy between her and Bren Cameron. Bren on the Deceiver cover is also well done, grimly determined and sharply dressed.
But it is in the alien mind that CJ works her differences. Atevi have no word for, "friend" or one for love as a human understands it. They are fascinated by numerology, sometimes to the point of superstition and live wrapped in layers of decorum and devious diplomacy suitable for the imperial court of ancient Japan, which in many ways their society resembles.
Over the series of books, Bren Cameron, like many a colonial official, becomes more and more drawn in to the world of the Atevi, frankly going native. He eventually ceases to work for the human government taking up Atevi titles, but always working for peace and better relations between the parties, backing the human-oriented Tabini, over traditionalists or those eager to get their hands on human technology for their own ends.
Bren is engaging personality, intelligent, loyal to his friends, even when some of them do not understand the word. In fact his loyalty downward to his guards is in their view a mild form of insanity, as their loyalties run primarily upwards in manichi. But Bren’s most likeable characteristic is that while in no means a warrior, he is often first in the charge and last in the retreat. Even if the charge is in the form of a diplomatic discussion, he is always personally on the line.
Bren is the focus, originally because he controls the flow of technology, but later through his relationships with the powers of the world: Tabini, his grandmother Ilisidi (a combination of Lucretia Borgia and Eleanor of Aquitaine) a host of other nobles and Tabini’s son Cajeiri, the most accessible of the Atevi characters, a precocious preteen.
Bren is kept alive in these struggles by his bodyguards from the Assassin’s Guild: Banichi and his daughter Jago, an infuriatingly impenetrable character who becomes Bren’s lover.
This cast of characters rolls through civil war, insurrection, assassination, the reappearance of the starship, the debut of the aetvie into space, the debut of new aliens, a coup and more plots than Game of Thrones on crack.
Holding onto your chair yet? Good, all of this happened before Deceiver opens. Therein lies one issue for the reader. Do not start reading this series with this book. Past a point in a series, especially if you are CJ Cherryh, you simply stop making each book its own complete tale because otherwise your prologue would essentially be a college course. That’s less of a joke with CJ then you might think. Don’t read these books when you are tired, or as a Twinkie. This is steak and taters with a Syrah to wash it down. Be sharp and pay attention.
A reader looking for action may find CJ’s work a little off-putting. There is a decorous pace to these books, especially Deceiver. Things like the colors of the new bus for the estate assume an importance that some readers might find trying, but like the English “plays of manners” things are done just so in the Atevi world. Displays of wit and political acumen dominate. Shots are fired when you miss a point and are revealed as stupid, or out of the loop.
This world has less wars, or what humans would recognize as wars, than does our world. Battles are usually fought between differing sections of the Assassin’s Guild. Everyone has them and they stay loyal (usually) to the party they are attached to. So war on this world is more a struggle of elite security forces than what we are used to.
Still, I find the actual military struggles vague as to detail and confusing. Even when actual battle breaks out and, as happens a number of times, Bren and his companions are caught in it, it’s sometimes hard to figure out what is happening. I understand that these are not Dickson’s Dorsai, nor "Hammers Slammers" yet sometimes it would be nice to get some level of detail. Two cruisers of TF 58 pummeled a costal defense battleship, the 1st of the 72nd’s tank destroyers cleared enemy armor off the road block, for example, but such is not to be. The combats are scuffles of cracked shots from unseen enemies with little information on the forces, arms and tactics. This is a book on grand strategy.
So while we get the details of how households work, and why it was important that someone didn’t indicate in their periodic reports that members of a certain clan were seen in a certain household, action is sparse.
Young Cajeiri is a very useful device for explaining the Atevi to us. He has been raised on the voyaging starship for a considerable period, to preserve him from the convulsions of the coup against his father. The child is learning to be an Atevi under the tutelage of his traditional-minded grandmother Ilsidii. But the humans and the ships and gadgets fascinated him and he quickly establishes foothold in worlds, human and Atevi. Like most young people he wonders why they world is the way it is, allowing the author to explain without making it feel like an info dump.
Another area I would have liked to have seen developed is the relationship between Bren and Jago his eight foot and better bodyguard. It’s a little like having one of the warrior elf-queens fall for a hobbit I suppose. She admires him for his intelligence and courage and develops a manichi for him, which is to say the functional equivalent of love; for all that they often do not understand each other. Once, in a prior book, she slaps him because he tried to lead enemy forces away from his household staff. For a human, this is personal merit in self-sacrifice, the mutuality of led and leader (to be a king in Narnia is to be first in the charge, last in the retreat) to an aetevi, this is insanity. Atevi run toward their leader when in danger and they do not expose their leader for anything, no more than samurai would.
There are not enough scenes between these two for me and I wanted to see more of WHY they are together. It’s not mere sexual attraction, especially on her part. Something deeper operates, but I never feel that I get more than a glimpse of it, nor do I understand its depths or limitations. Tabini gifted Jago and her father’s services to Bren. What happens to her if Bren turns on Tabini or Tabini on him? At what point does species loyalty come up for her, or does it at all? I would understand the subtext of a human relationship (think of the scene in Wall Street when Darryl Hannah bails on Marty Sheen. He is no longer a player; she is the woman of a player, so she is no longer his, regardless of what came before.) However between Bren and Jago the subtext is indecipherable.
Deceiver culminates in sudden move by Bren and his small team of guards to move into the home of the Deceiver, Pairuti, a rather muted villain who has been manipulating events and destabilizing the local and nation governments with his machinations. There is a brief blaze of action that determines the outcome. But was the Deceiver the puppet-master, or just another puppet? Stay tuned for Betrayer…
If Deceiver has a fault it’s that like most middle books, it’s the road and not the destination and it very much feels that way. Interesting though the journey is and however amicable the company, you do sort of feel that it ends with less fanfare than one would hope. Pairuti seems a pallid villain for all that he almost ends Cameron’s career in the final pages. This is in part because as we only have Cameron and Cajeiri’s viewpoints, we see very little of what is going on, having to think our way through what we hear. Often the principals do not meet, or even communicate. Compare that with the earlier Downbelow Station with its multiple viewpoints set close to the prime movers of the drama and one can occasionally wish we had access to a few more heads.
In sum, if you like CJ Cherryh’s dense, political, plays of manners, you will jump at the change in Deceiver to spend more time with these Bren, Jago and Ilsidii, even if you sometimes don’t feel that you know some of them any better than when you first met them. It’s is a milieu story where the layers of relationships are the milieu and who owns what old house or even apartment tells you who will fight where for what. Admire the machinations and the manipulations. Try to see the next move as if you were Hercule Poirot in an alien world. Expect to work and to think.
These are not the easiest reads, but I think you will find a satisfaction at the end, similar to that found in reading Clavell’s Shogun, when you realize that the prime mover in the whole book was Mariko. You spent the whole time watching and you didn’t realize it till near the end that everyone was dancing to her tune. Same thing here, watch for the puppeteer.

Happy Manic Monday,

Manic Monday: Dawn Binkley and Edward McKeown
Happy Manic Monday,


Monday is the day to share advice to unpublished and struggling writers. This Monday I wanted to share advice that Edward McKeown gave during our interview last Tuesday. It was simple, yet profound. I never thought of it quite like that before…


Editor: We have a special place for unpublished writers in our hearts, here at Hellfire Publishing. So what advice would you give to an unpublished writer?


Ed: The difference between the amateur and the professional is that the amateur gave up and went away. So true. Remember that the thing that makes you a writer is WRITING, not being published. You’re on a roll :) You have your own voice; write for those that are willing to hear and to read. That’s exactly right; it’s not about fame. It’s about telling the story, giving some freedom to all that creativity in your head. My writing has not reached astronomical proportions. I am not sure it’s even reached nominal proportions yet, LOL but I am more than satisfied with my words being out there, anywhere, than having millions in my pocket. Find a good writing group, not a therapy group (sometimes they look the same) and get criticized in a civilized manner. Be careful with writing groups, some of them are run by authors at the same level as you’re at. You want someone that has been there to give you advice. Not to mention, we are only human so sometimes petty jealousy pops up or another writer will like you and they will go on about how great you are and overlook blaring mistakes. I would never say don’t join a writers group, just be careful, because like anything else, there are good ones and bad ones. No one who uses the word “sucks” in any context is worth listening to. I won’t even go down that road; there is not enough bandwidth for my opinion on people like that. The more criticism that you expose yourself to the stronger the work will be. Yes, let me clarify how that works. You take the jumble of advice, as I did, years ago. First take the pellets of good will that you received the most, then take that and go over it, research and then go with your gut. Always consider the source, to thy own muse by true or why go through all of this? God knows it ain’t for the money or fame. That’s exactly what I was saying.


Also writers, write. Some people are in love with the idea of writing yet seldom set pen to paper. Ok, I just dated myself there…set finger to keyboard.


He’s so right here, too. Don’t let those ‘hot air’ people as I call them, discourage you. Sometimes I let them get to me. I feel like if that idiot can write, then my career doesn’t mean anything, it’s nothing special. But 9 ½ times out of 10, upon further investigation you find out that they have never written a thing.


You know how I can spot a real writer? They don’t mention being a writer at all and then quietly slip you their card at the end of the conversation. If you have written a novel, you are very humble, lol. It’s true, because sitting down to write a novel is a scary, humbling experience. And if it wasn’t, maybe you didn’t do it right.


I also leave you with this suggestion, you should want to aspire to be more like Edward, he is not only a great writer, he has it all down—technical and creativity. Any writer that comments will get a free download of the Liar of the Lesbian Love Goddess, to see what I mean. Also, he’s always polite and treats me (his publisher), his editor (Julanne) and the rest of the Hellfire staff with the utmost respect. I believe you can learn from him. But most important…the writer that is going to go places and take their work further than anyone could have ever imagined is the one that never stops learning.


Good luck to all of you, if you need any further help or advice, please feel free to contact me
dawnbinkley@gmail.com


Next week…


Building a fan base

The Hellfire Herald: Table Talk Tuesday

The Hellfire Herald: Table Talk Tuesday: Interview between Hellfire Publishing executive editor, Dawn Binkley and Edward McKeown Editor: How are you doing today? ED: As usual I ...