When I was young and easy to please, it was hard to beat an Edgar Rice Burroughs adventure in Pellucidar, or on Mars and Venus for fun and adventure. But when you are all grown up, how do you recapture that "Gee Whiz" dinosaurs and cave girls and lost world excitement? Well, S.M. Stirling sure gives it a try with "The Sky People". It's a modern spin of an Edgar Rice Burrough's type adventure. In an alternate history, both Venus and Mars are alive with life. The Sky People is about Venus and it's life forms. I'd rate this as slightly above average because I really liked the world that was created on Venus by Stirling; all of it's myriad creatures and environments were vividly created in my mind. There were several downsides to the book for me however - I really didn't care all that much for several of the main characters (and the cajun bit of the main protaganist got on my nerves and wore a little thin, as well as throwing me out of the story at times). I did like Teesa of the Cloud Mountain people and the bit of her culture we saw, however. I was also a little non-plussed by the lack of a real U.S.-Soviet rivalry within the story after the set-up. The other big downside was the abrupt, very strange, and incomplete end. After this big buildup and climax battle, we get no resolution of the big mystery and furthermore we jump perhaps a year and a half forward to the end scene with still no explanation of what exactly happened and why. It was like being on this great roller coaster that goes barrelling into the big dark cave and then, uh, stops. end of ride. Well, it was a fun Venusian adventure until the anti-climax which nicks a good half star off the fun. I hope the companion volume "In the Courts of the Crimson Kings" resolves a bit of the mystery. ( )

I picked The Sky People by S.M. Stirling from the library for the “alternate history” section of my 999 challenge. Based o the description I was expecting a combination of science fiction (set on contemporary Venus which has intelligent life on it) with alternate history. The later part came into play when the discovery of life on venus influenced human politics on Earth starting from the 1960s. As depicted in many other books (and hoped by the SETI crowd) such knowledge would make humanity realize that our local fights are so petty that they get abandoned. Other, more optimistic authors assume that humanity will just join forces in pursuit of learning more about the global outsiders. Stirling is more cautious and turns the cold war into a competition of who can get to the Venus first and establish presence there. But all of this is in the pat compared to the mainline of the book. Both the EastBloc and the US has establishments on the new planet while the EU is trying to catch up.

I didn't expect the book though being so full of descriptions of nature walks, hunting with a mix of modern and way pre-modern tools and in general being so much focused on the natural environment. But as you can read it on page 140: “[on Earth] you always knew that you were really in an island of wild in a sea of civilization. Here [ on Venus] it was exactly the opposite. There was a world out there, and the base... and its cities were the islands. Tiny little islands, in a sea of living things, all of them mating and killing and eating just as they always had.” Looking at it from this perspective the book's tone made sense. Too bad that hunting adventure stories are not my favorite genre.

Nevertheless the book was page turner, exciting and had enough twists for my liking. The linguistic, racial, gender and political mix was just right. Glad I read it; it was good entertainment, that didn't make me think much.

ZB5 ( )

Fun adventure, nice take on alternate history. ( )

Planetary Romance, 1980s style?

A clever idea this, in that aliens have seeded Venus with life, including humans and dinosaurs - and all the large scale other fauna that goes with that - canines, bugs and more.

So, discovering this in the 60s the space race becomes all important, and other areas of science suffer a little more than our current situation.

Nuclear propulsion gets manned crews of the Eastern bloc and America and allies to Venus - the main part of the story has some reasonably well established groups on the planet.

The politics are pretty simple and ham-fisted, which fits this sort of story somewhat, the good guys and bad guys as far as Earth goes. There are some groaningly bad incongruous paragraph dumps of the 'Americans are the best, of course' type, but also one of two jokes as in 'Norman Mailer and crew are upset at being marginalised as Edgar Rice Burroughs is now easily the USA's most preeminent author.' One author is when Stirling has a neandernthal mow down a character of no-importance named Jondlar - who was also the prettyboy guy in Jean Auel's the Mammoth Hunters. Could be just a joke, or Stirling pointing out he really doesn't like those - wouldn't be a surprise from the other bits of this book.

The rest of the story is pretty good, as a crashed Eastern Bloc shuttle asks for help from the Americans - who send a crew out which includes an airship pilot who is an experienced resident, and a couple of newer arrivals, as wellas the captain, and the wife of one of those in the crashed shuttle.

Now is when we get to the fighting dinosaurs and neanderthals with machine guns, chatting up local smart priestesses and alien technology part. This is all pretty good, as the airship survivors try and make an alliance with the enemies of the neanderthals and their alien overlords.

Given I have read a few Stirling stories before and didn't like them at all, I did like this more than I thought I would.

A bit over 3.5 rating for this one, perhaps.

http://superprose.blogspot.com/2008/0... ( )