In the early parts of the series, including this one, all of the Pip and Flinx books were good, fun reading. Nothing deep or overly complex, but still good stuff. ( )

I've been meaning to read one of Alan Dean Foster's Pip and Flinx novels for...I'm not really sure how long. Often included in the Science Fiction Book Club mailings, the names and covers would often catch my eye (I mean, who doesn't love a mini dragon-like creature?), but I've never got around to reading one until now. Published in 1972, The Tar-Aiym Krang is the first book to have been written in the series, and is Foster's first novel. Chronologically, it is also the first book except for the prequel For Love of Mother-Not which was published more than ten years later. I figured I might as well start where it all began and grabbed one of the several copies of The Tar-Aiym Krang off of the library shelves.

Philip Lynx, better known as Flinx, is an orphan growing up on the planet Moth. He's actually managed to do pretty well for himself--of course, being somewhat psychic is an uncommon but useful talent to have. And keeping Pip, a poisonous minidrag, as a pet guarantees that most people will pretty much leave you along if you want them to. But that doesn't mean it's always easy to stay out of trouble, and Flinx has found himself caught up in a deadly race to find a mysterious relic of the militant Tar-Aiym. Funded by the wealthy and powerful merchant Maxim Malaika and accompanied by his contingent of pilots, Atha Moon and Wolf, and his consort Sissiph in addition to the foremost authorities on the Tar-Aiym, Bran-Tse Mallory and Truzenzuzex, Flinx will get more of an adventure than he bargained for.

I was generally annoyed by several things in The Tar-Aiym Krang. Something that particularly struck me was the utter lack of a decent female character. There were plenty of women in the book, but none of them were given a real positive portrayal overall. I also dreaded any time Malaika spoke since he was constantly dropping foreign words (Swahili?) into his speech in such a way that was more irritating than adding depth to the character. It seemed more like a shortcut to needlessly exoticise him more than anything else. Less annoying but still vaguely problematic was that Flinx's powers were never very well defined but seemed to change or be added to as the story progressed or the plot required. I still really like Pip, though

I really was not impressed by The Tar-Aiym Krang at all. There were some very interesting ideas and concepts, unfortunately more as background information than anything else, but even that wasn't enough to save the book for me. Part of the problem was how it was all introduced, usually by info-dumps in the form of dialogue between characters who already knew all the information and really shouldn't have been discussing it except for the benefit of the reader. In addition, the beginning chapters were particularly awkward in style although that settled out pretty well by the end. There's not much plot to speak of, granted it is a shorter book, and what I'm assuming was to be the exciting twist in the story came as no surprise whatsoever. Ultimately, I think The Tar-Aiym Krang would have worked better edited down significantly and then used as an opening sequence in a larger work; it doesn't really do so well standing on its own. Even though some great elements were introduced to the story and world by the end of the book, I probably won't be making time for the rest of the series.

Experiments in Reading ( )

I'll give Foster this: the Space Foreigner in his book, Maxim Malaika, is an intelligent and knowledgeable character without whom the plot would have been infeasible. The expedition to retrieve the titular unpronounceable artifact would literally never have gotten off the ground. However, Malaika, smart as he is, is too dense to have noticed that a woman in his employ for six years is madly in love with him, enough so to eventually get in a really ineffective physical fight with another woman over him. And, like every other Fictional Foreigner, he is fluent in English but inexplicably given to dropping random native-language phrases -- heavy on the Swahili, light on the Russian, in this case -- into conversation. He also gets the unbelievably clichéd description: "Shockingly white teeth gleamed in the dusky face...." (Foster 48) Why shockingly? The man is insanely wealthy; does Foster think maybe he can't afford space toothpaste? And in what other part of the human body does Foster think teeth are ordinarily found gleaming? (Late in the book, he also gets this: "Malaika's eyebrows did flip-flops." O RLY?)

Malaika is also mercenary; possessed of terrible table manners (early in the book, he wipes his face on his ridiculously expensive sleeve); and given to casual sex with the whitest wimmins possible. Not only that, but his dialogue continually roars and booms in the lowest vocal register possible, like amplified James Earl Jones, in case we forgot from any of the early description that he's the Space Black Guy.

Women and the physical appearances thereof are also problematic. We have a classic crone archetype early in the book, but she's a prop to the protagonist, and he's already outgrown her care by the time the book starts. There's a Black-Widow archetype: rich, ruthless, gigolo-hiring, awful to her family, and one plastic surgery away from being Lady Cassandra from latter-day Doctor Who. (Indeed, when Malaika rings her up on the videophone thingy to taunt her about having foiled her cunning plan, he also disses her face, to her face.) Malaika's blonde is a Lynx; the protagonist defends (and defines) the Lynx to the pilot (and the reader) as not a prostitute per se, but something like the Firefly universe's Companions -- beautiful and charming women who have no interest in settling down, and who thus prefer to have serial relationships with fascinating, usually wealthy, men. (If you hadn't guessed it, there are no gays in this book, unless you really, really want to slash the Bran Tse-Mallory/Truzenzuzex pairing. I don't, because the latter is a sentient bug.)

However, Sissiph the Lynx is no Inara Serra. She is, rather, a spoiled brat who enjoys the fancy pretties Malaika buys her more than she enjoys Malaika (whom she, of course, calls "Maxy"); at the first sign of true difficulty, she turns all Anna Nicole Smith, and vows to ditch Malaika for an elderly googolplexionaire who will die soon and leave her to enjoy a "long, wealthy widowhood" (Foster 146). Also, it nearly goes without saying that she's dumber than a bag of hair extensions, including not knowing the difference between a reptile and a worm.

These objections aside -- and it takes me a fair bit of effort to push them there -- the book has two major faults remaining. One is common to hard SF: it revels in dense paragraphs that delightedly explain exactly how the author has figured every bit of l33t technology could work, especially with regard to spaceship battle, but not without the universe's history and sociology into the bargain -- shades of Heinlein there too, not just in the Women Problem and Stereotyped Space Foreigners Problem.

The other fault is the protagonist. Flinx is a Gary Stu of the highest order, being an empath with a Magic Pet and Tragic Past, and not only is he a Stu, he's the Wesley Crusher. He's just a kid, we're told repeatedly, but of course his presence and his alone is what makes the climax of the book possible, when not even the elder statesmen who showed up searching for the MacGuffin can bring about the necessary event. And when the book is over, he's got even greater Powers of Stu, as if the amazing archaeological relic the group found had only that as its entire point.

If I lay the snark on heavily here, it is because I liked this book a lot as a tween girl, identifying with the protagonist without having the conceptual framework necessary to figure out whether this novel could have worked with a girl of Flinx's age as the Mary Sue, or why all the named female characters were, in order of appearance, (a) old and ugly; (b) blonde, mercenary, petty, and dumb; (c) lovestruck, petty, and sneaky; (d) old, mean, vain, sex-obsessed, and the villain; and (e) sneaky, vengeful, and thoroughly pwned by the villain. It's like Disney fairytales in space, if you're casting female roles. Even the wealthy male characters haven't just possessed things; they've done things, seen things, gone places.

And that -- that's what isn't fair. Kindly, O writers, do not raise the hopes of the tween, only to lay the smackdown on the adult re-reader.

Oh hell yea! This book has the lot: space battles, space ships, good aliens, bad aliens, alien elder races, alien artefacts, space traders, space pirates, goodies, baddies, who-knows-whatsies, different tech-levels on different planets, different tech-levels on the same planet, an alliance between merchant-princes and the church, mysteries, enigmas, secrets, lies, withholding of information and it’s all set in the future in space! What’s not to like?

The enigma driving the plot is the krang. A fabled alien artifact that may be a weapon or may be a musical instrument but, as it’s named after the noise made by a metal guitarist thrashing out a power chord at the beginning of a 30 minute guitar solo that allows the lead singer to go backstage and avail himself of a sauna, a snack, some smack or some groupies, it has the potential to both wreak mass destruction or musical mayhem or both.

Elder races in science fiction are fantastic. I can never get over the idea that the story is set in the future, but the elder race have long since vanished. Does that mean that they are around now? That would make so much sense, especially when you consider that what mankind manufactures today that is really going to endure for millennia is most likely to be, say, a vast weapons system in a hollowed out mountain range rather than, to take a random example, a donkey sanctuary. Thousands of years from now, if alien archaeologists do come down to our planet and try and work out what we were like from our artefacts, they are probably going to conclude that we really, really liked drinking from styrofoam cups and that the barrels marked ‘toxic waste, biohazard, do not open’ make your face melt when you crack one of those suckers open even if you do come from Citrus Prime XII or wherever.

Given that mankind doesn’t really make an effort to get to know their fellow man even when they share the same time period, if not the same country, it’s good to see the humans in this book taking a stab at unravelling the mystery of a long-dead alien race. The humans are assisted by other aliens, but the krang and its makers are about as easy to understand as a public address tannoy system on a wet day.

The chase is the thing. It kicks off with a treasure map, that falls into the wrong hands, that turn out to be the right hands and very quickly the central character is drawn into events beyond his control and very out of his depth, even among those in the same treasure hunting party. As a street urchine he’s charmingly adrift, and knows it. But he’s a fast learner. The rest of the characters, merchant-princes, archaeologists and pursuing assorted henchmen are all excellent and, although this is a treasure hunt among the stars for an alien artefact, you never have that dreaded ‘oh wait a second, this is tosh’ moment.

From the start of the action on the trading world of Moth, to the finale on a lost world in a haunted stretch of interstellar space known as ‘the Blight’, it’s a breathless chase and one you yourself get caught up in. By the end of the book I was anxious to find out just what the bloody hell the krang was.

I loved the theory postulated at the start of the story that the krang is a weapon or a musical instrument or (pause for effect), both. Both? What? Are we expecting some sort of banjo with a rocket launcher gaffa-taped to it?

The result is worth waiting for and the chase across space is great fun. There are a lot of interesting ideas here; that even in the future you still get want, suffering and greed, that rather than some safe and sterile future, space travel offers a life more like that of an adventurer in the age of sail, that dormant abilities in the human mind can begin to show themselves and that this gives rise to fear and suspicion and that an alien superweapon is unlikely to be portable enough to strap to a banjo. ( )

The Tar-Aiym Krang is hardly classic sf by anyone's definition. But I vaguely recall enjoying it and its three sequels when I read them back in my late teens. And it was unlikely I'd ever get around to trying them again unless I bunged the first book on a reading challenge list. The same, of course, was also true for Vance's Star King... and that pretty much cured me of wanting to reread the rest of the series (see here).

So, The Tar-Aiym Krang. First published in 1972, this was Foster's first novel as well as the first book in his popular Flinx & Pip series of, at present, fourteen novels. Flinx is an orphaned young man of (mostly) good character, but dubious morals and profession, in the city of Drallar on the world of Moth; Pip is his minidrag, a flying poisonous reptile. Flinx is also a little bit telepathic, and Pip is empathic.

Read the rest of the review at: http://justhastobeplausible.blogspot.... ( )