his rousing interstellar bildungsroman is divided into four books, roughly marking the different stages of its hero's life.
In Book One, we witness the crash-landing on Conrad's World of a small vessel containing a 5-year-old boy and his governess. Cale Alexandros, heir to a fortune, and Sidonie have been dispatched from a dying vessel to take refuge with Cale's uncle in the city of Morningstar. But they land instead on the portion of the planet reserved as an isolated penal colony. Sidonie is raped and battered and left for dead. Cale becomes the slave of local villagers. After some years he flees for another village, where his status is somewhat higher: abused servant. He meets a mysterious and scary itinerant peddler named Blackburn, who recognizes in the boy some greater destiny. Blackburn counsels Cale to accompany him to Morningstar, but Cale refuses. Eventually, though, Cale sets out into the wilderness on his own. He meets many strange characters, including the brothers Aliazar and Harlock. Cale also digs up and then reburies a mysterious book. After many adventures, he finally arrives in Morningstar.
Book Two finds Cale, a young adult now, leading a somewhat shifty life in the city of canals. But when he nearly dies and is nursed back to health by a woman named Karimah, he finds new purpose in life. Karimah and her friends are Resurrectionists, a cult dedicated to understanding the Jaaprana, the long-extinct aliens who preceded mankind. Cale joins the Resurrectionists in their quest. He encounters Blackburn again, this time accompanied by a Sarakheen, one of the cyborg class who consider themselves an elite. When Cale is parted by circumstance from Karimah and reunited with his governess, he suddenly realizes that the artifact he found in his wanderings is the key to the mystery of the Jaaprana. He and Sidonie retrieve it and head off-planet, back to Lagrima, Cale's ancestral home city.
Back at Lagrima, in Book Three, Cale encounters his mother, a tragic figure gone mad. He and Sidonie take over the reins of the foundering family business and begin making plans to follow the instructions found within the Jaaprana book, the Rosetta Codex. But Blackburn and the Sarakheen again intervene. Cale manages to fob them off with deceptions. But in the final book of his life, as they search out the final resting place of the Jaaprana, these rivals for the alien heritage will dog his footsteps tragically to the conclusion of his long odyssey.
A thoroughly modern space opera
In this lovingly composed novel, full of turbulent drama and high emotions, Russo has created something that is at once timeless and timely. His story is both pure SF and pure fairy tale, or rather a hybrid that embodies the best of both. By employing the trope of an orphan who owns a hidden majestic destiny, Russo also evokes many another classic of literature. These resonances enhance the reading experience considerably.
Perhaps the earliest book that readers might harken to is Dickens' Oliver Twist (1838). Cale's early youth is as rough-edged and traumatic as Oliver's, although he is less naive and more capable than that lad, who often seemed more a pawn than a player. (Consider that one of Cale's early acquaintances in Morningstar is named Feegan!) But any number of earlier fables about youthful foundlings, such as "Puss in Boots," are relevant. (Sidonie, in fact, acts much like that wise and loyal cat companion.) In the genre, we will immediately summon up comparisons to Heinlein's Citizen of the Galaxy (1957) and Earthblood (1966) by Laumer and Brown. Additionally, the vengeance and obsession motifs bring to mind many a book by Jack Vance, most notably the Demon Princes series.
But Russo's synthesis of all these predecessors is uniquely and magnificently his own. The trials and tribulations that Cale undergoes, and the lessons they teach him, are always authentic and unforced. We watch his personality assemble itself around his congenital nucleus of character, and moreover, we watch him begin to try to plumb his own depths. The process is always psychologically fascinating.
Nor does Russo skimp on the exotica, conjuring up many vivid locales and people in robust language. Consider this passage: "The canals were lined with dwellings of broken concrete, cracked and rotting wood, shanties of metal and planks and brick held together by little more than hope; rusting wheeled carts, scoots, and planked wagons. An astonishing number of people moved among the ruins, sat by cookfires, or squatted hunched-over on mounds of garbage; a few half-naked children gazed listlessly at the skiff as it moved by." Here we could be in one of Leigh Brackett's Planet Stories classics. And Russo's use of sudden jumps in the chronology of his hero—both within and between chapters—lends a wonderful mythic feeling to the narrative.
The speculative concepts in this novel are hardly cutting-edge. Andre Norton (another possible influence, although this book is hardly Young Adult) employed a similar bevy of hardcore SF talismans. But they are inhabited so fully, by both author and protagonist, that they shine forth with renewed splendor.
