The Hub : Dangerous Territory

A bunch of short stories (novellas/novelettes) followed by a short novel. Read for the Schmitz shared read - it was supposed to be The Demon Breed, but I decided to read this set of stories and discovered (to my surprise) that I had read very few of them (actually, I'd read one of the ten).
5/31 The Searcher - I've never read this one before; nice deus ex machina, well-handled (and excellent ratcheting up of tension). It is an oddly abrupt end, but I guess it said what needed saying.
5/31 Grandpa - I have read this before; I remembered the red bug rider, and after the fact recognized the rest of the story, but I didn't remember the solution until it happened.
6/1 A Balanced Ecology - another new one, clever. show more More-intelligent-than-believed aliens, and working with the native creatures (though here it was more the native creatures working with the humans).
6/1 A Nice Day for Screaming - I'm starting to see patterns, mysterious lights in space (ish). This one was less malevolent, but people's feelings were much more completely described so it was scarier.
6/1 The Winds of Time - Oh look, more malevolent lights in space. Plus oddly intelligent alien (animal). And...wait a minute, weren't they going _forward_ in time? Something off at the end.
6/1 Mechman - rather familiar alien animals (the clean-up crew?), used much as in A Balanced Ecology...and Searcher, for that matter. Hmm, reading a bunch of his short stories in a row may not be a great idea.
6/2 The Other Likeness - More nearly-human aliens. The government here is amazingly...peaceful? Not vindictive, and not bureaucratic. Not what I expected, and certainly not what they expected.
6/2 Attitudes - And more nearly-humans. Dealt with in a completely different way - but appropriate (as it was in The Other Likeness) to their own behavior and attitudes.
6/3 Trouble Tide - More like Grandpa and Mechman - knowing the creatures of this world allows Nile Etland and her partner to solve two intertwined mysteries and discover some truly weird new effects from some of those creatures. The fat-shaming at the end is...rather icky. Why should that effect bother Nile so much - and did it not bother Parrol? Sheesh.
6/3 The Demon Breed - An interesting mixture of action-adventure and psychological fake-out, in multiple directions. I like Nile, she's smart and capable but not a superwoman - she gets out of her depth but manages to manage it anyway; her knowledge of the world and its creatures is immensely useful (as we see in the previous story, as well as here). The otters are fascinating, particularly that there's no evidence where they came from (which strikes me as really unlikely, so probably a trick of the Overgovernment...or not). The Parahuans are...actually kind of pathetic, even when they're being utterly foul and nasty. Even the most powerful of them are missing major actions against them, constantly - Ticos has so many plots and plans going while they think he's entirely helpless... The battle is interesting; the way we learn about it is more interesting. I liked the idea of memory recordings. And the analysis by the (other) aliens at the end is excellent - without telling the reader anything more about the Overgovernment or...whatever, we get to see the effect of the actions, short and long-term. A great set of stories, with The Demon Breed as an excellent capper.

Flint's discussion of the series is rather bland and forgettable - mostly it's an ad for the next books. The "recurring characters" piece might have been very interesting, but the formatting was completely screwed up (reading an epub on my phone) - there are character names, story titles, titles of books?, but they're scattered randomly down the page and I have no idea how they're related. Oh well. Schmitz's stuff is good. show less

(Original Review, 1980-12-18)

While Telzey (and Trigger Argee) are okay, my favorite Schmitz heroine is Nile Etland of THE DEMON BREED. No psi, but an intriguing water-world ecology, and a smart, level-headed, very competent fempro. Schmitz has consistently led the field since the mid '60's, in having more SF books with female protagonists than any other writer, 5 at present. But if he doesn't have a new one in the works, he's surely going to be matched by Barbara Paul, who has had 4 between 1978 and 1980. (Joanna Russ and Anne McCaffrey have each had 4, also, but over 11-year spans.) Spotting new fempro paperbacks isn't so much of a problem for those put out by the usual publishers, it's the off-beat ones that are hard to come by. Where show more new Manor books are sold I have no idea -- certainly not in our local SF-oriented emporia, nor in any of the supermarkets I've checked. Yet I've found 2 Manor fempro's in 2nd-hand SF racks, which leaves me worried at what others might have been issued that I've missed. For a collector, it's no consolation that SF from such sources is almost inevitably 3rd rate at best... about like what you'd expect from a vanity press.

[2018 EDIT: The above edition on the picture is the 2001 edition I bought later on in that very same year.]

[2018 EDIT: This review was written at the time as I was running my own personal BBS server. Much of the language of this and other reviews written in 1980 reflect a very particular kind of language: what I call now in retrospect a “BBS language”.] show less

I could only get through the first story and it was a mess. The pace of the book and the lack of back story just made for a fast push to the purple energy monster. Could not stomach it.

Not recommended!

baen ebook

Read Online: http://webscriptions.net/10.1125/Baen/0671319841/0671319841.htm