ast year saw the release of John Barnes' The Duke of Uranium, which introduced us to the character of Jak Jinnaka. Jak is a young man just graduated from secondary school, and at loose ends. Brought up by his mysterious rich Uncle Sib, Jak is something of a wastrel—smart, handsome, physically adept, but mainly interested in coasting through life and having a good time. His classmates Dujuv, Myx and Sesh (the former a male buddy, the latter two the girlfriends of Duj and Jak, respectively) are perfectly content to party with him. But upon graduation, Jak's life will undergo radical changes.
The future milieu Jak inhabits, some 1,500 years from now, is so radically different from ours as to be almost bewildering (a difference reflected in many neologisms). A thousand years in Jak's past, an alien race known as the Rubahy went to war with humanity, drastically altering the face of Earth and other worlds. Humanity won, however, and now the few surviving Rubahy are accepted as peaceful members of the solar system. That very solar system now features flourishing, oddball polities on Mercury, Venus, Mars, Earth and the outer planets. But the two biggest power centers are the Hive—Jak's home—and the Aerie, both vast habitations at the L4 and L5 points in the Earth-moon system.
When Jak learns that his girlfriend, Sesh—recently kidnapped—is really the princess of Greenworld, one of the Aerie nations, he embarks on a quest to help her, a quest that takes him around the solar system and earns him the enmity of a merciless killer, Bex Riveroma, and the friendship of a Rubahy, Shadow on the Frost. But at the adventure's successful conclusion, Jak discovers that there were levels of duplicity he never fathomed.
A Princess of the Aerie opens some two years later. Jak and Duj and Myx are getting their higher education, while Sesh has taken up the life of royalty on Greenworld. An urgently imploring message from Sesh brings the three to Greenworld. Upon arrival, they find they have been lured into a trap. Jak and Duj are pressganged into Sesh's palace guard: in reality, a stud farm for a princess turned mad in her carnal appetites. Thwarting an assassination attempt on Sesh's father—an attempt Sesh engineered—earns Duj and Jak only an exile to the hellhole of Mercury, main source of the system's metals and minerals. There they confront a new combine known as MLB, a sleazy and deadly operation which seems intent on establishing a chokehold on Mercury's resources. When Jak discovers that Bex Riveroma is behind MLB, the competition turns personal and deadly. For Bex has very good reason to kill Jak and take a certain item literally planted within Jak's body. As the downtrodden miners begin to stage their rebellion, Jak and Duj add all their skills to the revolt. But will even years' worth of training in the meditative martial arts known as the Disciplines be enough to save them? And if they survive, how will Jak ever deal with Sesh's treachery?
Not just your father's
Heinlein juvenile
These two novels by the immensely talented John Barnes (at least a third one is also scheduled, to be titled In the Hall of the Martian King) offer some of the best reading thrills in recent science fiction. Yet they also present a minor puzzle, tangential to their high quality, and that puzzle concerns their intended audience. Appearing as they have as paperback originals, with quasi-humorous retro titles, and featuring a juvenile protagonist, they at first appear to be relatively unsophisticated Young Adult offerings. All Barnes's "adult" novels make a hardcover debut these days, so these two would seem to be mere "entertainments" in the Graham Greene sense of the word, with which label Greene distinguished his "lesser" efforts from his "serious" books. Indeed, the opening chapters of Uranium come very close to an updated take on classical YA books by Heinlein and Norton. Yet Barnes has lavished an immense amount of speculative fervor on this particular future, albeit cloaked in a slam-bang action-dominated plot. The substantiality and ingenuity of this milieu are no less than that of his other "adult" books. There are vast cultural/sociological changes to go along with the dazzling high-tech goodies on display, as we are gradually introduced to a multiform set of polities bound together by the Wager, a set of principles laid down by a kind of long-dead Hari Seldon figure known as Nakasen.
So one devours the first book with delight, yet with slight twinges of unease. Is this mere adventure fiction, of a particularly accomplished stripe? Or is it meant to be a more "mature," serious novel? The casual sex and the equally casual backstabbing are the points where unease is highest. But perhaps young readers accustomed to Buffy and other complex shows of its ilk are more sophisticated than previous generations.
The second book seems to resolve our questions, however. Sesh's detailed transformation from spoiled brat (think Veronica Lodge) to murderous nymphomaniac (think Catherine the Great) would be a dead giveaway that Barnes is working at fully adult levels here. The slower but equally disturbing transformation of Jak from naive and good-hearted to cynical and utilitarian is the clincher. Despite its youthful hero, this series is not kid stuff.
But what it is is a rousing good read, full of excitement and brilliant riffs on genetic engineering, interstellar travel, interspecies interaction and social change. The second adventure is a bit choppier than the first, which had an organic unity of plot missing in the latter. Princess breaks into two incongruent halves: the part on Greenworld and the part on Mercury. And although Barnes strives manfully to join the two at book's end, the explanation seems strained. Yet any minor plot holes will not impede your major enjoyment of this romp through a highly vivid, sometimes nasty future.
