Polar City Blues

An old favourite, and I still love it. A fast-paced thriller set in a tiny human Republic poised between two larger, more powerful galactic neighbours. When a Confederation diplomat shows up dead in Polar City, police chief Al Bates must race against the clock to solve the crime if he is to avoid all 3 governments landing troops to 'keep the peace'. But there are other problems unsettling the city slums: an alien artifact, a mysterious disease, and a rumour of the Devil. Only Bobbie Lacey, ex-spacer, comp jockey and trader in information has access to all the sources to start putting the pieces together. But will a ghetto girl work with the cops?

There's a lot to like here - Lacey is smart, cool-tempered and competent; the world-building show more is clever, exposition light, more than the sum of its parts; and the plot bounds along without really pausing for breath. We get 5 alien races, psychics, space-faring and AIs - although AIs aside (a bit creaky by modern computing standards - Buddy has to think a bit hard for a modern Googler ;) the planet Hagar is deliberately low-tech and most of the action takes place in the slums, which has limited how badly the novel has aged over the past 20 years. I like that racial prejudice is inverted, and sexism, homophobia and religious prejudice seem to have disappeared into a melting pot (although we only see a small slice of society, so this may be misleading).

That said, this is one for which mileage may vary. It's told in present tense, for a start, and the characters speak in a future faux SoCal dialect that's could be grating. Still - if you get past this and aren't bothered by men fancying older women - it's a lot of fun. show less

Reread this for the first time in many years (as I'd recently acquired the second in the series). I'd forgotten how much I'd enjoyed reading the book; I remember liking it enough to not dispose of my copy. An enjoyable murder mystery set in a human colony on a desert planet sometime in the far future, it feature aliens, psionics, politics and baseball in a first contact police investigation plot. Back when this was first published, cross-genre works were uncommon and this was a welcome addition.

The aliens are believable and on a par with CJ Cherryh's aliens, the world seems to hang together with the plot, and thought has been given to how psionics fit into society.

Recommended.

Good fun, excellant SF from an author better known for her fantasy work. It is almost as if she'd been challenged to write a book to appeal to men - 'your fantasy stuff is too drippy*, can't you write something with y'know sport and computers and hot women 'n'stuff" - and this is what she came up with. I'm really not convinced about the baseball being the surviving sport centuries into the future after the decline of NASA, having sucessfully reached othar stars, but the rest of it is belivable enough.

* I don't actually know that this is the case, because I've never been able to find the start of her series'

Mankind is the buffering Republic between two other sentients, and has a small collection of planets to it's name. On one of these, show more a dry desert world just about habitable at it's poles, lies a small city, home of the ambassadors. When a body is found casually discarded in a holo-fountain, the chief of police Bains, has little to go on. However it happens that a local psychic is on hand - following a paragragh of exposition psychics are more common now - and when he collapses, Bains realises that something potentially mroe serious is afoot. Very shortly a cross cultural interspecies incident is brewing.

The writing style is an oddly dispassionate third person which makes it very difficult to empathise with any of the characters. We swap point of view with three or four main actors, but none of them assume the central role. However this is something that you fairly quickyl get use to and only appears odd when you resume reading after a pause. The telepathy was well worked through and the whole noir crime angle, and the impact of technology also seemed pretty good. The aliens weren't that unique though, too obviosuly based on lizards insects and chimps, perhaps the lizards working best of any of them, abnd although there was an attempt to portray their different approaches to problems, it didn't really succeed in making them feel alien.

Worth reading, and I'll definetly by looking out for the continuation plus other works by the author. show less

My first Katharine Kerr science fiction novel. There is a lot happening in this book: an inversion between the expected racism in our society; multiple alien species; political intrigue; murder; disease; and a first contact with a new alien species. The book could have included fewer plot elements and still have been excellent. Regardless, this book is quite good, and very unexpected from what I consider to be a fantasy author.

http://www.stillhq.com/book/Katharine_Kerr/Polar_City_Blues.html

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