In the future Humanity has spread among the stars but as a significantly junior partner to the mysterious,uncommunicative and far more advanced races which make up the League of Peoples. Meanwhile the main human government, covering many worlds, has created a branch of the military service called the Explorers filled with general purpose problemsolvers. Foremost among them is Festina Ramos, featured in several of James Alan Gardner’s previous novels (I read and enjoyed Expendable and Vigilant, the first two of the six novels in this sequence, before starting this blog), the youngest Admiral in the Technocracy because of her uncanny ability to be in the right place and solve the most difficult problems.
Explorers are chosen because in an age of near universal physical perfection each somehow has a significant–and visible–imperfection even though genetic tampering is theoretically illegal. Youn Su’s mother is so obsessed with the Bamarian (Burman) culture’s ideal of beauty that while Youn Su is in her womb she pays a back alley geneticist to alter her daughter’s DNA but such hubris cannot possibly succeed.
As Radiant (2004) opens, 19 year old Youn has graduated from Explorer Academy and been assigned for a couple of uneventful to a spaceship along with a normal navy complement and the slightly older, undeniably insane explorer Tut. They’re sent down to a city which has been infested with red spores, elements of one of an advanced race called the Balrog.
Gardner doesn’t explain why the city has been invaded but in the course of resolving the issue–again we’re not told how or why–Youn Su ‘agrees’ to host a small number of the telepthically-connected spores and Admiral Ramos turns out to have already been elsewhere on the planet. Another crisis sends the three Explorers to see if they can rescue a group of scientists studying a possible colony world, one which was mysteriously abandoned 6500 years ago by aliens which shortly thereafter transcended and became one of the advanced races.
Youn Su, a Buddhist, gradually agrees to greater assistance/body infestation by the Balrog, each time taking a step towards enlightenment. Though the scientists are gone, they aren’t dead, not quite nor are the previous inhabitants. We learn too that the Explorer Corps are not simply outcasts, that Gardner intends this book to tranform the series from an interesting future history to something more. I do look forward to where he goes next.
recommended
BillSaysThis 