he Twin Worlds of Prairie and Timber are home to billions of humans. After more than a century of peace, they are prepared for interstellar war with nearby Huvea. Twin Worlds Plenipotentiary Gregor, prior to attending a peace conference aimed at avoiding the war, visits the Citadel on Timber to talk to a dozen Huveans who volunteered as hostages. But he is summoned to visit Adm. Radigast of the Twin Worlds space fleet, and must leave with his granddaughter Luon.
Radigast informs Gregor that scout ships have detected signals from a very large ship entering their system that does not appear Huvean. When approached, the alien ship destroys the humans' ships and continues toward Prairie, where it proceeds to sanitize all life from the planet's surface. At least one ship of cadets, however, is captured and taken aboard the alien Berserker.
With his fleet mostly damaged or destroyed, Radigast orders all fighting ships to defend Timber. The Berserker, which sustained injuries destroying most of the humans' fleet, also heads slowly toward the second planet. The Twin Worlds president sends communiqués to Radigast and Gregor that make it clear that he is insane and seeks to turn over power to his artificial intelligence agent, named Logos. Gregor returns to Timber to visit the president with Luon, who admits she is in love with one of the Huvean hostages. Faced with an insane president, Gregor is forced to take control of the government. When the Berserker lands ground forces, he flees back to Radigast's ship. Meanwhile, in the chaos, Luon frees and escapes with the Huvean hostages.
A ship arrives conveying the delegates to the peace conference, including a Carmpan, from a peaceful alien race with the ability to determine the exact nature of the Berserker through entering a state called Prophesy. Then the Huvean fleet arrives, demanding the hostages' release. Gregor and Radigast must convince First Spacer Homasubi to join forces to have any hope of destroying the Berserker and saving the billions of people on Timber.
A worthy addition to a world at war
This is the 17th book in Fred Saberhagen's Berserker series, whose initial stories were published in 1963 and which has been continued through last year's novel, Berserker's Star. The series is classic adventure SF with a strong 1950s/1960s flavor. Through this series, Saberhagen has contributed one of the lasting tropes of SF, the ancient alien war machine that has outlived its creators and continues to seek to exterminate organic life, an idea first taken to the screen by the "Doomsday Machine" episode of the original Star Trek.
Berserker Prime is a well-crafted SF adventure novel and a worthy addition to the series. Saberhagen stays faithful in this book with one of the standard clichés of military SF—that military commanders are intelligent, decisive and compassionate men of action, while political officials (in this case excepting the protagonist Gregor) are power-hungry, ineffectual and often sniveling idiots. The Carmpan are a fascinating alien race, and it would have been interesting to see more of them in this book.
Although published late in this series, Berserker Prime is obviously set very early in mankind's encounters with the Berserker machines—no one in the book has even heard of Berserkers—and longtime fans of the series may be disappointed that this latest novel adds very little new information on the history or nature of the relentlessly evil machines. But this novel remains a valuable, if somewhat predictable, addition to one of the classic series in the genre.
