Skinner by Richard S. McEnroe

Published by Bantam Books in December 1985

Skinner is the third (and, apparently, the last) novel in Richard McEnroe's "Far Stars and Future Times" series. There is an ad in the novel's back pages for a fourth book titled Chains of Knowledge, but it isn't included in McEnroe's bibliography and I've found no evidence that it was ever published.

Skinner begins on the planet Wolkenheim, where most of the action in Flight of Honor (the second book in the series) takes place. The Earth emigrants who settled Wolkenheim (the First Wavers) have implemented a scheme to make sure their hard-won prosperity isn't supplanted by newly arriving immigrants: anyone setting foot on Wolkenheim who can't establish his financial solvency is forced into indentured servitude -- serving, of course, the First Wavers. Chavez Blackstone has been scraping by on Wolkenheim, but after engaging in a drunken brawl with a member of the power structure, he's declared insolvent. He seeks off-world passage from ship's captain Moses Callahan, a character in The Shattered Stars (the first book in the series), but before he can make his escape he's captured and taken to the planet Trollshulm where he's put to work for the powerful Santer Family. The Santers make their living by producing dragonskin, a fabric that comes from dragons that are native to Trollshulm. The dragons are docile creatures until someone tries to kill them, which is the difficult job given to skinners -- and Blackstone's new vocation.

Seamlessly merging with the main plot is a story of economic and political intrigue as Eli Santer fights to save his fabric monopoly from a competing product, from a disloyal employee, and from new flight technology that will undermine his way of doing business. Joining the two plotlines is a woman who works for (and sleeps with) Santer, who feels compassion for the skinners he economically enslaves. Political machinations run through the story, but politics and economics take a back seat to the action, making Skinner a very readable novel. It's almost as good as Flight of Honor, although it feels like it was written a bit hastily, as if McEnroe had to cut some corners to meet a deadline. Still, Skinner is a worthwhile, intelligent read for sf fans. It's unfortunate that McEnroe didn't continue the series beyond the three fine novels that he produced.

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