So yesterday’s rant had more than one trigger. Though these books by Mike Resnick are a three-pack, they’re also part of his larger Birthright future history which includes Santiago, the most celebrated of his works, which I read enjoyed not long before picking up the review in blog habit.
These three books focus on a very odd young woman named Penelope Bailey. Some odd mutation made Penelope precognitive, gives her the ability to see possible futures, thousands or millions of them at any given moment. From an early age she realizes that if she makes movements she sees in one or more possibility then that future (or group of them) is the one that will occur. By the age of six agents of the Democracy, the largest government in human space’s thousands of planets and a billion ships in its space navy, has taken her into its care.
In Soothsayer, the first volume, a coupleof years have passed until she’s able to conive an escape. As the book opens she hooks up with a protector. The Mouse, a magician/con artist’s assistant and acrobatic cat burglar, rescues the little girl from an alien holding her hostage. Carlos Mendoza, the Iceman, retired Democracy operative, assassin for hire known and feared across the worlds of the Inner Frontier, and bartender/lord protector of a planet called Lost Chance, is Mouse’s former boss and the love who got away and she turns to him for help.
Everyone has or wants a flashy nickname in this future. Mendoza is tired of his; at 50 he wants nothing more than to be left alone pouring drinks and sweeping out drunk miners from his bar and casino. Having left Mouse behind on their last government mission together years before, he cannot now refuse her but seems to be the only human capable of recognizing the threat Bailey poses. The government believe they can guide and control her, Mouse wants to be the mother every eight year old girl needs and an assortment of rogues and pirates can’t see past greed.
14 years pass until Oracle begins, and for ost of that time Bailey has been held captive by an alien race on the planet Hades. She’s finally seen futures in which she can escape. Coincidentally, Mendoza’s been commissioned by his old government handler (the arrogant 32) to find and either kill or bring her back. Mendoza subcontracts the work to a big game hunter turned assassin but after realizing–since he’s the only one, still, who recognizes the danger Bailey is–that this is not a good idea and he heads out to intercept his hired hand.
Prophet is set only six years later. Hired guns come to Lost Chance almost weekly to take out the Iceman but he can’t be taken on his own turf and they wind up six feet under instead. Finally one corpse yields a clue and Mendoza’s new assistant, the Gravedancer, chases off planet to find the paymaster. Which turns out to be a new holy man named Moses Mohammed Christ, the Anointed One, who leads a (nameless) fanatical religion with hundreds of millions of followers on thousands of worlds.
Why has the Anointed One targeted Carlos Mendoza? Because he’s the only human being to come in contact with Bailey twice and live, and the leader sees Bailey as a more dangerous foe than the Democracy itself. He’s right, of course, but blinded by his own lightening success; in the end, the Anointed One’s fleet of several thousand interstellar warships is defeated by the Prophet’s strange ability without her having a single soldier or gun. A step here, a raised arm over there and ships’ engines explode taking a few dozen nearby unfortunates with them.
Mendoza understands this must be the outcome, of course, since he’s still the only human who doesn’t underestimate Penelope. He uses the attack to sneak onto the planet so the two can have one last conversation.
So do these books suffer from the trilogy disease? I’d have to say yes. Resnick reuses the Birthright ‘verse, pads the books (heck, he uses the same two page prologue in all three), reuses the story structure and, worst of all, each of the volumes is only around 250 pages. But I got my money’s worth since the Bigu Guy lent me Prophet and I got the other two from the used bookstore for $2.50 each.
And the stories are enjoyable, Resnick is a good writer and the basic invention, the precognitive girl, is not similar to one I’d seen before. Still, I wish he’d have made this one good book with the three stories as novellas at a total of around 400 pages. Santiago was much better.
not recommended
BillSaysThis 