arry Silver is a principled, cunning, hardy rogue. With his ship, Witch of Endor, he roams the thousands of settled human worlds, hauling cargo, stealing weapons and generally profiting from the ignorance and avarice of others. But his latest scheme seems a bust: He's landed on Hong's World with a shipment of food machines that no one wants. Why? The sun of Hong's World is about to go nova, and a desperate spacelift involving millions of citizens is underway as they abandon all property. In this chaos, Harry encounters Lily Gunnlod, desperate for a ride to the world Maracanda, in search of her missing, possibly kidnapped husband. After some cajoling, Harry agrees to take her there, along with two other paying passengers, men named Dietrich and Redpath. The fact that their flight path will take them across space where beserkers have been sighted is only mildly alarming to Harry. He's dealt before with berserkers—sentient weapons left over from another era of the galaxy, bent on exterminating all life—and survived.
Not long out of Hong's World, Dietrich and Redpath attempt to commandeer the ship. Harry effortlessly scotches their scheme and abandons them on a deserted space station. But the two men have planted a seed of doubt in Harry's mind about Lily's complicity in their plans. He watches her closely for the duration of the flight, but can't make up his mind about her innocence or guilt. Once on Maracandra, part of a three-body celestial arrangement involving a neutron star and a black hole, Harry finds himself agreeing to accompany Lily further in the quest for her husband. Maracandra—an anomalous world of shifting surfaces, odd composition and different zones of physics—is not a welcoming place. Luckily—or perhaps not—Harry hooks up with an old cohort, Kul Bulaboldo, who's been living on Maracandra for some years. Bulaboldo agrees to help Harry and Lily reach the frontier town where her husband might be. They arrive, and the sad reality of Alan Gunnlod confirms Lily's truthfulness.
But Harry's adventures are hardly at an end. Bulaboldo wants Harry to help him with a scheme involving a drug manufactured from the unreal substance of the planet itself. Dietrich and Redpath have inexplicably shown up on Maracandra. The Space Force authorities have locked up Harry's ship. And berserkers have just been sighted on Maracandra itself. ...
Good, solid space adventure
This year marks the 40th anniversary of Fred Saberhagen's literary invention of berserkers, cruelly cold and predatory AIs bent on wiping the galaxy clean of "badlife." (Saberhagen himself has reached his 73rd year, with no signs of slowing down.) As John Clute has remarked in his Encyclopedia, Saberhagen's cybernetic conceit has become "a significant icon of genre SF." This latest adventure, while thrilling in its own rights, does not, it seems to me, greatly expand on either the dramatic or metaphysical potential of the berserkers—but perhaps at this late date, such explorations are too much to ask for.
In the earliest berserker adventures, collected in Berserker (1967; all stories originally appearing in Galaxy from 1963-1966), men and women came face to face with their steely enemies, engaging in dialogue with them, matching wits, testing what made humans human and machines unhuman. The latest book has no such interplay. The berserkers are offstage for most of the narrative, and when they do appear, it is as unspeaking menaces, devoid of personality. Some frissons are present, derived from displays of their cybernetic reflexes and ambitions, but such are minimal.
Luckily then for the reader, Saberhagen's other virtues carry the day. Harry Silver is nicely sketched, a kind of Han Solo figure who will spout self-centered talk while his altruistic actions betray him. As a foil, Lily is rendered cleanly too, nervous yet strong. Her climactic actions arrive as a great surprise. Together, Harry and Lily evoke the kind of partnership seen between Bogart and Hepburn in The African Queen (1951). Add in the Falstaffian figure of Bulaboldo, and you've got a winning cast. The planet Maracandra is the fourth major player here, and Saberhagen does a fine job of making it weird and otherworldly. Although not built quite up to the standards of a Poul Anderson or Hal Clement, Maracandra and its two primaries still make a fascinating backdrop for the action. The trip by caravan across its shifting surface possesses a kind of Vancian exoticness.
There's nothing outdated either about Saberhagen's cultures or their technologies. He's kept up admirably with state-of-the-art SF, and while this book is hardly as revolutionary as something by Stephen Baxter, it's not mired in an old-fashioned sensibility. One likes to imagine that if Keith Laumer had survived to the present at the top of his game, this is the kind of book he'd be turning out as well. Good, solid space adventure with a believable MacGuffin, engaging protagonists and some real feelings along the way.
