Robert Chilson

This old gold-spine DAW paperback faked me out with its packaging. The jacket copy on the back cover uses chess as an extended metaphor to the point where I thought that it would be an ingredient of the novel itself, and I was thus hoping to add this book to my survey of "living chess" in fantasy and sf literature. The Kelly Freas art on the cover shows a gigantic (scale supplied by a passing spaceship) naked girl in golden manacles and chains on a starry background, which suggested that the show more book might be one of the salaciously-inclined sword-and-planet titles of its era. But the art was also a false cue.

The novel is set in a far future after widespread interstellar colonization by post-terrestrial "Starlings"--a speciated mutation of humanity whose telekinetic abilities form the basis of faster-than-light transport. "Mere" humans continue to outnumber Starlings and have been settled on the colonized worlds as a subordinated workforce. The protagonist Race (his name, "Race") is a supremely rare human "latent" who develops Starling powers at adolescence, and the book concerns his struggle to rise above his inherited human station.

It's not a long book, and it's a fairly fast read. It does end without resolving many of the dilemmas in which the author had placed the main characters, and there may have been some unfulfilled intention to issue sequels. Characterization isn't very sophisticated, and an awful lot of attention is spent inside Race's head as he worries about his problems. The main merit of the book is its world-building. But it wasn't such a fascinating setting that I'd recommend it on that basis alone. show less

A very creative sword-and-sorcery-but-in-space-or-something.

When Chilson tells the story, this is a very enjoyable book. Lots of neat ideas and some absolutely stellar worldbuilding. Chilson is an incredibly creative writer.

The problem comes when Chilson goes overboard when doing the worldbuilding. Sometimes there are pages and pages detailing the history of a building or area or even some hill. I think in the first 50 pages maybe 20 actually moved the plot forward. Huge stretches of the show more book just read like a history textbook, with all the fun that entails.

By the end of the book the deep worldbuilding can be appreciated for how much depth it added, but in the moment the huge historical passages sometimes felt like a chore to get through. I really wish the plot had just hit the ground running instead of taking almost 100 pages to really break out. Because this is very enjoyable and well written. show less

This is a surprisingly deep genre-bender - not a fantasy, but a book about fantasy. There is some acute and slightly acidulous topical commentary between the lines.

After reading this book and Men Like Rats, I'm going to find and read everything this author has ever written.

A gigantic alien race conquers the Earth to use it for… storage!?

Men Like Rats presents a world where the planet is covered with gargantuan warehouses (Lows) and cargo is moved back and forth via automated drop ships (Highs). Humans eke out an existence on the fringe, infesting the warehouses and ships like vermin. The setup reminded me of Rene Laloux’s strange animated movie Fantastic Planet with humans creeping among an outsized alien landscape that they do not comprehend. In Men Like show more Rats though, the aliens are offstage.

We follow Richer the Quick, a human who has been living on his own for a while. The book doesn't really have a single story. It's more about following Richer through the world Chilson has created. Exploring that world was pretty interesting. It appears that things have been this way for a long while, as the humans have already adapted their theology to explain the Cargo, the Highs and Lows and the reason their Creators provide so well, yet have seeded their world with traps and vicious beasts (which are actually intended as pest control). The entire human race (or what we see of it) has become a cargo cult.

I think the description could have used some work. He chose to write the narrative using the language of his characters. This gave the book a bit of a learning curve, which has been used to strong effect in other sci-fi novels, but I'm not sure it added to this book. When I started the book, I kept thinking, what is a High? What is a Low? What is a Middleplace Low or a Lowerplace Hole? I had such a hard time figuring things out that it drew me out of the narrative. Lots of the landscapes he writes about are so alien anyway; some nice concrete descriptions would have helped the reader connect to the book a little earlier.

Still, I did get into the book. There was a neat concept here, but it was a little too confusingly presented. However, if the premise sounds interesting I would say pick it up. It has issues; but at only two hundred pages, if you don’t mind spending a short time with a book where the premise outshines the story being told, it is worth a read. show less