brief prelude informs the reader of the backstory to this opening installment in another series by the prolific and popular Jack Chalker.
Shortly into the 21st century, humanity masters interstellar wormhole technology, allowing the species to spread tenuously among the stars. (Some wormholes are used in "wild" form, others are engineered for more reliable transits.) Most habitable planets are settled by small groups of like-minded people, members of cults and sects and the major religions.
Over all rules The Combine, based on the homeworld. This situation flourishes for a time until suddenly, without warning or visible cause, the wormhole system fails. Many of the worlds of humanity fall out of contact. A kind of galactic Dark Ages reigns. One planet, Vaticanus, holds a role analogous to the medieval Church, maintaining a remnant of trade and exploration. When one of its scouts in search of lost outposts of humanity instead discovers a strange solar system hosting three weird planets--soon named after the biblical Three Kings--humanity's curiosity is piqued. But the wormhole path to the Three Kings is lost, and over the following decades, the system becomes legend.
The main story commences with the arrival of a large missionary ship named The Mountain (crewed by a thousand true believers led by their charismatic Captain, Dr. Karl Woodward) at a nameless lost colony. In attempting to bring the primitive colonists back into the fold, Woodward and his followers discover that the agrarian humans are secretly dominated by the more sophisticated remnants of a pirate crew whose own ship crash-landed some 30 years before. Desperate to escape their exile, the pirates attack. After much fighting, full of elaborate feints and counterfeints, Woodward wins, but at no small cost. Part of his victory, however, is vital knowledge dragged from the pirates: the coordinates of the Three Kings, a prize which the Captain is determined to take for the greater glory of God, and the stage is set for future volumes that will enlarge and explicate the various puzzles left unsolved here.
Quest of the three worlds
Jack Chalker has an uncommon knack for fabricating enough incidents, characters and events for a dozen lesser novels, then cramming them into one book. The exciting action never lets up in this saga, which combines some of the post-apocalyptic religious atmosphere of Walter Miller's A Canticle for Liebowitz with the starfaring adventure of Christopher Stasheff's current Rogue Wizard series.
But despite this surface allure, all is not smooth sailing. Chalker's prose often seizes up, crying out for a stern editorial hand. Such awkward constructions as "Whatever it was, what happened was that..." jar and grate.
Action scenes and dialogue are written more flowingly, but expository passages drag. Chalker's characters are just 3-D enough to hang some clothes on (though naming a key woman "Eve" in a theologically inclined story was not a subtle idea). The most detailed fellow here, Captain Karl Woodward, resembles no one so much as Heinlein's Jubal Harshaw, and is prone to issuing bluff pronouncements and aphorisms (remarkably absent are any actual Biblical verses; it's all paraphrase) that make the reader wonder why his crew puts up with him. The mystery of the Three Kings solar system has promise, but the reader has to slog through a diversionary detour comprising three-quarters of the book before getting there.
Chalker recalls such old stalwarts of the field as Eric Frank Russell and Christopher Anvil, if not L. Ron Hubbard from the days when Hubbard still retained pulpish vigor. There's nothing innovative about this tale, but as a walk down memory lane, it trundles along in a sprightly enough manner to keep the reader turning pages.
