| SF Reviews by Aaron M. Renn | By Author - By Title - By Date Reviewed |
Conclusion: Marginal
Warning: Some SPOILERS Ahead
Selecting books to read is often an complex process, but in this case it was a simple one. In my immediate post-golden age years I stumbled across a Foster novel and my collector's instinct took over. Foster is now one of only two authors whose original novels I have a complete collection of. These two books were purchased mostly out of a sense of obligation, not any real belief that I'd find them of genuine interest.
Foster is, for better or worse, a formula writer. The formula is that some ordinary, mundane person - often a scientist - stumbles into something of the fantastic, embarks upon some quest or journey for which he is incredibly ill prepared, muddles through it, and 100,000 words later reaches some satisfactory outcome. I know this sounds like a lot of F/SF books out there, but there's a Foster-specific version of it. Those of you who've read him know what I mean.
Interlopers is the science fiction sub-formula. Dr. Westcott is an archaelogist studying the ruins of a pre-Incan civilization in South America. Finding a cavern covered in drawings, he discovers that one panel is a recipe for a potion of some sort. Naturally, he has a chemist friend of his whip it up and he drinks it. As it turns out, this potion gives him an enchanced vision to see the Interlopers. These are parasitical creatures who exist out of phase with our own world. They inhabit trees and rocks and the like, and when you make contact with an infected item, the parasite feeds on you by causing some type of psychic suffering. The might manifest itself in a bout of sickness or an explosion of anger or something else entirely - but definitely something bad. These parasites are apparently responsible for much of what ails the world.
Now these Interlopers know Westcott can see them, and they aren't happy about it. They try their best to kill him, and when that fails, infect his wife. Of course, Westcott then is forced to go on a quest to find the magical cure that will disinfect his wife.
At first I thought this book had real promise. I was drawn in by the premise, and thought I might get to learn more about the Interlopers and perhaps witness some confrontation of note. Alas, this story basically fizzles, with an ending that zig zags off into an unpredictable and unsatifying direction. This is the first Foster novel in a while that actually engaged me from the start, which made the last third of the book even more of a disappointment.
Kingdoms of Light is the fantasy version of the formula. A war breaks out between the good guys of the Gowdlands and the bady guys of Totumakk. You get the impression at once that even Foster doesn't take this book seriously. The lead bad guy's name is, I'm not making this up, Khaxan Mundurucu, which had to have given Foster a chuckle when his random fantasy name generator spit it out. The bad guys are manifestly pure evil, but not in a menacing way. Though they enjoy drinking blood, to rturing small animals, and the like, Foster handles them with a comic touch. They' re basically light parodies of bad guys, and serve merely as props to provide the excuse for the story. Our protagonist in this case is a group of animals. Or more precisely, a group of animals that were once the pets of the deceased chief wizard of the good guys, who were magically transformed into humans when some soldiers sprinkled the dust of said wizard's cremated body on them.
This quest involves finding a way to save the good land by restoring color to it. The bad guys had laid a curse on the good land which eliminated all color, leaving everything a dull gray. This somehow sapped their will to fight and if only color returns, somehow the enemy will be vanquished. After much debating over the merits of their new forms, the quest is begun. The transformed animals, now pursued by bad guys, find a rainbow and somehow end up inside of it. Each color is a different kingdom (hence the title), each of which is radicially different, each of which harbors dangers the company does not suspect and is clearly unable to cope with, yet which they overcome by hidden magical powers that manifest themselves at the appropriate moments. After the requiste number of narrow escapes to pad out the novel to the contracted for length, comes the final confrontation with the bad guys.
There's less than nothing special here. While there's nothing actively awful about Kingdoms of Light, it is clearly just another product cranked out by the Thranx, Inc. extruder. Even by the standards of light fantasy, there's way better out there. I am dumbfounded that this book was actually published in a hardcover edition. But maybe there are enough people like me who got hooked on Foster in junior high and have enough of an obsessive/compulsive disorder around book collecting to make a market for it.
There are some things to admire in Foster. His books are workmanlike jobs, fairly short, and he rarely suffers from sequelitis. I'll give him credit for having to think up new scenarios for most of these new works without relying on world building from previous volumes. But he sabotages this with his generic and recycled plots. Admitting you have a problem is the first step, and with my current very limited reading time, maybe I'll find a way to break out of this Foster collection obsession.
%A Foster, Alan Dean %T Interlopers %I Aces %D 2001-05 %G ISBN 0-441-00847-X %P 313 pp. %O mass market paperback, US$6.99
%A Foster, Alan Dean %T Kingdoms of Light %I Warner Aspect %D 2002-02 (original publication 2001) %G ISBN 0-446-61061-5 %P 384 pp. %O mass market paperback, US$6.99
Reviewed on 2002-08-18
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