Falcon

After his royal family and homeworld are betrayed, Niki Falcon (né Glyndwr) becomes a gestalt pilot. The good news is that he can directly plug into his starship and fly it with his mind; the bad news is he's now a junkie with five years before inevitable madness and death. He's at the end of that allotted time when he gets the opportunity for one last score: a dangerous passenger, deadly opposition, and a ghost from Glyndwr's past. Also, W. B. Yeats.

Falcon starts slow but gradually builds into something rich and unbearable -- and then skips ten years forward for the sake of dissolving into a generic pulp-SF mess. I don't know if I would hate the second half of the book as much as I do if it weren't for the gradual beauty of the first show more half. But then, it's the second half of the book that advances the central innovative idea of gestalt pilots, who shoot up regularly and love their ships and kill themselves rather than face mental disintegration. The first half of the book, in which Niki is a young and tempestuous princeling in a techno-Celtic civilization, isn't particularly exciting and wouldn't rate a novel by itself. And yet there's some great writing in the first half, and Niki's family develops effortless pathos. By contrast, the second half of the novel feels like one of those yellowing paperbacks with a neon-orange rocketship on the cover that you can still buy for a quarter. Aside from the gestalt pilots, it's straight Saturday-morning space serial. After that first half, I was hoping for something more. show less

I honestly don't know how many stars to give this, or how to write a better blurb for it. It's an intelligent and literary SF thriller, is the best, and least, that I can say.

The first half reads a bit like historical fiction, because Niki is an actual prince, in a some place far away that has been heavily influenced by Welsh traditions. The second half is very much intrigue & adventure. Lots of oblique hints & nuances that many readers relish but that drive me nuts. The ending is pretty big, y'know the thing SF does sometimes where a new thing becomes a big deal (like 2001, but not that big tg).

Exemplary sample:

"When Niki left his room he was washed, neatly dressed, and half convinced that someone had vacuumed his tongue. He wished show more desperately that he had a pin of almost anything; even Poison, the purchased suffering of weekend poets, would run like gas-blue fire through his veins and clear his mind with pain. Sleep would have been nice." show less

Fun, but oddly structured. Lacking in any kind of obvious relevance to current social problems it's still well enough written with an interesting hero.

The setting is some vaguely benevolent corporate galactic empire, and the book opens with a welsh based colony looking to maintain their traditional semi-independent roots. Our hero the youngest son, has returned from a long summer break to find that pretty much everything has gone to pot. His always stern father is now authoritarian and the next eldest brother has few plans to improve the populaces' moral. But he can't stand by and do nothing.

The remaining two thirds of the book don't feature this planet or it's problems at all, they get mentioned once in passing. The hero has now show more become a tech enhanced FTL pilot, requiring ever larger doses of drugs to keep him relatively normal. Chance lands him a contact with someone who used to work in his mother's laboratory, and despite the pressure from a unhappy corporation, chased by an ex-lover and most of the systems navy, he is granted the opportunity to realise his birthright.

Once you accept that the first third is so distinct from the rest then it's quite nicely plotted little story. show less

Part one" of this book gives us Niki, a prince on a well-established colony world heavily influenced by Welsh culture (but not the Welsh culture that one usually finds in fantasy novels - more like that of modern Britain.) 19-year-old Niki has been a typically self-centered teenager, but when he returns from summer vacation to find the political situation in his city rapidly deteriorating, he finds a new sense of responsibility. But it seems that it may be his family responsible for the troubles, and finds himself associating with some dangerous elements amongst the "common people."

This part of the book was a well-done and absorbing political intrigue, and I was looking forward to the unraveling of the twists and turns... when it all show more came to a drastic end rather abruptly.

"Part two" starts with Niki again, between 5-10 years later. He's left his past totally behind, and realized his dream of becoming a space pilot. However, he's done this by signing up for an experimental procedure that depends on both hardware and drugs to meld the pilot with his ship. Unfortunately, the drugs cause a degenerative condition - and so far, none of the experimental subjects have lived more than five years. Bitter and desperate, when Niki is approached by a famous interstellar pop star and asked to accompany him on a desperate and illegal quest that reminds Niki of his youth, he signs up for the job. However, more than just memories will be back to haunt him....

Bull ties up the seeming discrepancy between the two parts well at the end - it works, but I still found the abrupt shift a bit jarring.

Still, this was a well-written and enjoyable book - a bit darker and more introspective than much 'space opera,' but still an entertaining, action-filled story. show less

This is a book of two halves. The first half is a ridiculous Ruritanian fantasy disguised as SF - the second half is a first class space opera. If only the second half existed, it would have got at least four stars. The first half hardly deserves a single star...

Cool far future setting. Likable protagonist. Awesome description of gestalt piloting.

Not Ms. Bull's best by a long shot. I agree with other reviewers that there are really two books jammed together here: a Graustarkian story and a science fiction story. I disagree that either was anything special.