The Linköping Science Fiction & Fantasy Archive Main Page - Contents - Search 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 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Linköping SF Archive / Mats Öhrman