![]() This book combines an interesting take on "alien invasion", human nature, and the nature of war itself while telling a perfectly readable and accessible story. Reviewed this a good while back.just correcting a typo. Oh, and the Weave, if you're out there and need my help. I recommend that you read it and discover for yourself. I found myself setting the book down for long stretches to avoid yelling at it, "Mankind has been fighting for the entirety of recorded history, you jacka$$!" or "Good grief, have you never seen a boxing match or watched a football game? Humanity LOVES violence! That's why action movies make ten times the money as art flicks! (or symphonies- a fact of which you might expect a music professor writing one to be cogent.)ĭoes Will take his blinders off? Does humanity join the fight? Do we get wiped out because one college professor (who doesn't even friggin' TEACH!) can't keep his mouth shut when he's in over his head? While the book is well-written, particularly when it shifts to the point of view of the Amplitur, who really believe they are doing the right thing, Dulac's insufferable arrogance made wading through the rest of the book a chore. Well, Willie, considering that the people in question actually went interstellar and participated in the conflict while you sat safely on earth writing music, I'd have to argue that they are a lot more likely to persuade people like me than you ivory-tower morons living in the theoretical. Whose influence was most likely to persuade, theirs or his?" (Chapter 15, electronic version) The so-called recruiters the aliens intended to use consisted of an old drunk, an ignorant fisherman, and some poor boys literally taken off the streets. Not Will: "After all, he was a professor, an educated, sophisticated man. Anyone without the monstrous ego of a college professor would consider the decision whether or not to get humanity involved in an interstellar war would be a LITTLE above their pay grade. Will Dulac has no right to make decisions for us as a species. I'm sure we can all agree that one pacifistic music professor- currently not teaching and on sabbatical- speaks for each of the six billion humans on earth, right? Somehow I was lucky enough for advanced alien species to contact ME, and therefore I am going to interject my personal prejudices and bias into their perception of humanity, and potentially GET MY WHOLE FRIGGIN' PLANET DESTROYED BY THE AMPLITUR BECAUSE *I* DON'T LIKE VIOLENCE SO OBVIOUSLY NO ONE ELSE DOES, EITHER!" We don't want war any more, and we certainly don't want any part of an interstellar conflict!" can be boiled down rather simply to: "I am a music professor from New Orleans who is suffering from writer's block. His petulant insistence that "Humans are peaceful. Will Dulac needs to be punched in the mouth, repeatedly. ![]() He also won the Ignotus Award (Spain) in 1994 and the Stannik Award (Russia) in 2000. His novel Our Lady of the Machine won him the UPC Award (Spain) in 1993. The book Cyber Way won the Southwest Book Award for Fiction in 1990. Splinter of the Mind's Eye, a bestselling novel based on the Star Wars movies, received the Galaxy Award in 1979. ![]() Other books include novelizations of science fiction movies and television shows such as Star Trek, The Black Hole, Starman, Star Wars, and the Alien movies. The Tar-Aiym Krang also marked the first appearance of Flinx, a young man with paranormal abilities, who reappears in other books, including Orphan Star, For Love of Mother-Not, and Flinx in Flux.įoster has also written The Damned series and the Spellsinger series, which includes The Hour of the Gate, The Moment of the Magician, The Paths of the Perambulator, and Son of Spellsinger, among others. Several other novels, including the Icerigger trilogy, are also set in the world of the Commonwealth. His first novel, The Tar-Aiym Krang, introduced the Humanx Commonwealth, a galactic alliance between humans and an insectlike race called Thranx. This interest is carried over to his writing, but with a twist: the new places encountered in his books are likely to be on another planet, and the people may belong to an alien race.įoster began his career as an author when a letter he sent to Arkham Collection was purchased by the editor and published in the magazine in 1968. Foster lives in Arizona with his wife, but he enjoys traveling because it gives him opportunities to meet new people and explore new places and cultures. in Political Science from UCLA in 1968, and a M.F.A. Bestselling science fiction writer Alan Dean Foster was born in New York City in 1946, but raised mainly in California.
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