Swann, S.Andrew

"Forests of the Night" by S. Andrew Swann
CCC_REX@waikato.ac.nz (Rex Croft)
University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand
09 Aug 93 23:03:55 GMT

"Forests of the Night" by S. Andrew Swann
				- reviewed by Rex Croft  ccc_rex@waikato.ac.nz

An exciting futuristic dectective thriller with a difference.
The difference being that the main character, Nohar Rajasthan, is a gene
manipulated tiger.  Many of the nations in the world have started from
animal genes and produced human form soldiers.  We have tigers, dogs,
rabbits and rats amongst others. Unfortunately they are treated as
second class citizens.  And they probably wouldn't be that if the Pope
hadn't decreed that they had souls.  And then at the bottom of the social
ladder we have "franks", genetically modified humans.  Although outlawed
by the UN, Japan and South America have continued with their experiments.

So, in this world, Nohar accepts a commission from an anonymous frank to
investigate the killing of campaign manager of a rising politico.

The plot is well paced with several fight scenes.
The ending has an unexpected twist which enhances the plot.

I really enjoyed this book.  Highly recommended.

%A  S. Andrew Swann
%T  Forests of the Night
%I  DAW
%C  New York
%D  July, 1993
%O  paperback, US$3.99
%P  284pp.
%G  ISBN 0-88677-565-5
%O  Cover art by Jim Burns
%O  Copyright by Steven Swiniarski

Specters of the Dawn by S. Andrew Swann
sheol!throopw@dg-rtp.dg.com (Wayne Throop)
The Internet
Mon, 25 Jul 1994 23:30:35 GMT

I just picked up the second and third books in the "franks and moreaus"
books by S.Andrew Swan.  The books are _Forrests_of_the_Night_,
_Emperors_of_the_Twilight_ and _Specters_of_the_Dawn_.  I ended
up reading the two end-to-end in a single day, so they are nicely
addictive.  Worth reading IMHO.

The moreaus are gengineered animals, designed for combat, and given
intelligence, and a more humanoid appearance, so they can take orders
and use existing military equipment.  Name from "The Island of Dr. 
Moreau".  The franks are gengineered humans, with various enhancements,
but most often for war or intelligence work (so they could actually do
the things James Bond is portrayed doing...).  Name from "Frankenstein". 

The general background is "after the Pan-Asian war", where technology
has suffered quite a setback, as Japan was on the losing side in a
world-war-sized war in which only the Americas largely stayed out of. 
Israel and India are nuked into oblivion in the 2010 timeframe, as is
Japan (so it's not just countries that begin with "I").  Refugee
remnants of moreau armies from all over the earth become the new US
immigration problem. 

The South American countries designed to be able to breed soldiers
fast, and so based their designs on rats, rabbits and the such.
England and Ireland used foxes.  The Afghans and Pakastani used
dogs, to create loyal pack-oriented military units.  Others used
bears, others panthers and cougars.

The Indians used tigers, and the series starts out following the
second-generation Indian immigrant Nohar Rajasthan, a 2.5 meter 300
kilogram tiger-derived moreau, who has gone into the Private
Investigator business in Cleveland.  He accepts an improbably lucrative
assignment, and immediately gets mixed up with Afghani assasins, the
radical moreau underground, and government corruption. 

The second book picks up some years later, told from the point of view
of Evi Isham, an Israeli frank working for the US intelligence community. 
Her character had been introduced in the first book.  James-Bond-like,
she is attacked mysteriously by the forces of SPECTRE... well, by
somebody anyway, and mayhem ensues.

The third book picks up again an even shorter time later, and follows
the activities of Angel Lopez, a rabbit moreau, and again a character
introduced in the first book.  She too gets mixed up in mysterious
goings-on, and mayhem ensues.  In the third book, we also get to
meet some franks adapted for direct (enhanced)human-to-computer hookup,
and it is packaged with a timeline for the general background of the
series.

The cover art is uniformly pretty good, by the way, and actually seems
to depict the characters at lest minimally according to their descriptions.
Little mistakes like makeing the sclera of Evi's eyes green when it was
said that the *retina*s had a green reflective effect that could be seen
(presumably a "green-eye" effect like that of nocturnal animals like cats
"red eye").  But at least not embarassingly bad, IMHO.

Not that the books aren't flawed.  The moreaus seem a bit too much like
humans in fur, and while one can argue that they were designed that way,
I wouldn't expect quite so much *success* at such designs.  The underlying
plotline never seems to really go anywhere much... each book claims to
have blown the lid off of it, but the next book start up the same basic
mystery again, ringing only slight changes on the theme.

But there's a detailed, rich background to grok, while being taken on
a roller-coaster of an action-adventure ride.  While all the elements
don't quite ring true, they *do* ring enjoyable, and once you accept the
basic background elements, they are deployed admirably well.

%A Swann, S. Andrew
%T Forrests of the Night
%I DAW
%C New York
%D 1993

%A Swann, S. Andrew
%T Emperors of the Twilight
%I DAW
%C New York
%D January 1994
%G ISBN 0-88677-589-2

%A Swann, S. Andrew
%T Specters of the Dawn
%I DAW
%C New York
%D August 1994
%G ISBN 0-88677-613-9

--
Wayne Throop   throopw%sheol@concert.net
               throop@aur.alcatel.com

PROFITEER by S.Andrew Swann
throopw%sheol.uucp@dg-rtp.dg.com (Wayne Throop)
Wed, 05 Apr 1995 02:52:51 GMT

This is the first of a series of three books, the others to be published
in December 1995 and January 1996, according to information on the
"other books by" page. 

Previously, Swan has written FORESTS OF THE NIGHT, 
EMPERORS OF THE TWILIGHT and SPECTERS OF THE DAWN, set in a post-war
world where genetically engineered combat-critters (called "moreaus"
when derived from non-human stock, and "franks" when derived from
human stock) try to fit into only-human dominated civilian life.

I was very much drawn to those earlier works, despite what I felt was
a bit of a stretch for the main premise.  Despite the problems I saw,
what you get with Swan is a solidly-told adventure story, and a coherent,
detailed, and even (despite my misgivings) plausible and "real-feeling"
world as backdrop.

This work is more of the same.  It is (as far as I know) Swan's fourth
book, and he has gotten gradually better and more polished in each effort
so far.  It is set in an interstellar community that has had a brush
with the Vinge Singularity, and  has hence banned many if not all
autonomous AI, especially self-replicating nanotechnology.  This has
led to a stable but high-tech arena in which to set several stories,
such as this series.  We can also tell that Swan's "moreau/frank" universe
is directly ancestral to this one, but the details don't enter into
the story, and won't disturb anybody who hasn't read the previous books.
Sort of like Heinlein mentioning the Roads, but you don't need to have
read "The Roads Must Roll" to appreciate the later stories.  In this case,
it just provides a sort of exotic background flavor, one of many kinds
of "nonhumans" that populate the story.

Swan's nonhumans are one of his strengths, IMHO.  YMMV, but I found them
much better than the usual human-in-a-slightly-exagerated-
animal-du-jour-suit sort of aliens one usually gets.  The typical
cardboard aliens one gets are cats, see, or centaurs, or reptiles, or
whateverthecase.  And they act like slightly anthropomorphized
caricatures of people's prejudies of their prototype animal.  Bleah. 
Not so with Swan's.  In his frank/moreau stories, it would have been all
too easy for him to fall for that, and he even points out that some
moreau species were based on animals specifically to get animal
psychology: eg: combat teams gengineered from dogs, so that they'd have
a natural "pack" dynamic.  But Swan manages to throw in the bit of
surprise, the bit of complication, the bit of depth that makes it all work. 

For one example, swan has a bird-like alien (depicted on the cover
fairly accurately from the description, BTW).  But he takes pains to
point out that it is NOT a bird, and was evolved independently, and
that calling it a birdlike is only a sort of shorthand for the reality. 
An in that one character, he alludes to a whole culture and social context
of deep-background material for his novel that is part of what lends it
its interesting and complex flavor.

There is also a "Libertarian" flavor involved here, sort of like
Heinlein's _The_Moon_is_a_Harsh_Mistress_, or Vinge's "The Ungoverned",
or F.Paul Wilson's LaNaque Federation stories.  The planet upon which
the action takes place was settled by... well, by anarchists.  You
can form most any kind of organization you want, but if you call it
a "government", your neighbors will turn on you, demolish your works,
and practically salt the earth you contaminated with your heresy.  I must
admit it makes for an interesting arena; not a boring society by a long shot.

The basic plot is laid out fairly early: a CIA-like operation is mounted
to destroy "Godwin Arms", an arms manufacturing corporation on a world
over which the spooks don't really have proper jurisdiction.  And the
manuverings to justify this operation to political oversight, and the
double and triple agendas of the people pushing for and against it are
only the start of the complications.  The person in charge of the operation
has a long-standing grudge against the owner of Godwin Arms; did the
people who assigned him know of this, and want him to pursue his vendetta?
Or were they ignorant, and things are about to blow up in their faces?
Or perhaps a third party slipped the obsessed commander in, and the
blowup is part of somebody *else's* plan.

Wheels within wheels.  And can Godwin Arms' employees anticipate the
future moves of the spooks in time to avert the mysterious "phase two"
of the covert op?  And why *is* that alien so interested in human
military hardware and intra-human covert ops and dirty tricks anyway?

As appropriate in a first-of-series, it ends up with more loose ends
than it answers any fundamental questions.  But you get a rip-roaring
adventure tale to drag you along through the book, so you don't notice
it so much until you are thinking back on the rollercoaster you've just
been on.  A "page turner" as they say, but with some interesting depth
to think about after the last page is turned.  At least, IMHO.

%A S. Andrew Swan
%T Profiteer
%I DAW Books
%C New York
%D April 1995
%G ISBN 0-88677-647-3
%P 349 pp.
%S Hostile Takover
%V Book 1
%O paperback, US$4.99

--
Wayne Throop   throopw%sheol.uucp@dg-rtp.dg.com
               throop@aur.alcatel.com

Review: PARTISAN by S. Andrew Swann
sheol!throopw@dg-rtp.dg.com (Wayne Throop)
Intelligent Agents Group
Fri, 22 Dec 1995 20:26:29 GMT

[As a review of the second book in a trilogy, this might be something of a
spoiler for the first volume.  --AW]

This is the second book in the Hostile Takeover trilogy.  As is usual for
middle books in a trilogy, more details of wider theme are laid out, some
threads left dangling from the first book are tied off, and new ones are
unraveled to be resolved by and by.  A satisfying book, perhaps, but not the
rush of a new story unfolding as in a first one, nor the sweep of resolution
as in a final one.

But despite the problems a middle book is heir to, there's a good solid
adventure story here, and plenty going on to keep the reader involved.  You
can read the book stand-alone, before the first one, but you'll be missing
out on a lot of detailed background, so some of the quick interleavings will
make less sense than they would otherwise.

The adventure story is simply the continuation of the conflict set up in the
first book, between ex-spook Dominic Magnus, and his still-spook brother
Klaus Dacham, who is obsessed with hunting down Dominic, and killing him.
The reasons behind this conflict slowly become clearer as more details are
revealed across the span of both books, and we see looming behind the scenes
many hidden layers of related events, both fallout from and motivation for,
the simple foreground conflict.

Wheels within wheels, the personal conflict is wound up in a political
power-play to force the anarchistic planet of Bakunin to join the
Confederacy (which it so far has declined to do), which in turn are wound up
in succession politics in the Confederation executive branch, which in turn
affect the balance of power between multiple planetary alliances, both human
and alien.

And the intricate political setting is complemented nicely by a rich
technological background, as humans have many high-technology artifacts, but
have intentionally shied away from the Vinge Singularity, having been burned
by nanotechnology and AI disasters.

Swann does seem to get a bit more polished and adept with each book.  He's
written a trio of books (a bit more independent than a trilogy, but just
barely) about the frank/moreau era in the same universe as this trilogy, and
he has the touch of laying out an intricate background and setting amongst a
deftly told story that I most like about the SF genre when done well.

So, while not strictly necessary, you may want to get the first in this
series, to read it in order.  But the series in general, and this second
book in particular, are well worth the read.  I'm eagerly awaiting the
finale.

%A S. Andrew Swann
%D 1995
%G ISBN 0-88677-670-8
%I DAW
%C New York
%O $4.99 paperback
%P 342 pages
%S Hostile Takeover
%T Partisan
%V 2

Wayne Throop   throopw%sheol.uucp@dg-rtp.dg.com
               throop@aur.alcatel.com