Knight by Timothy Zahn

Published by Tor Books on April 16, 2019

Knight is subtitled A Chronicle of the Sybil’s War. It is the second book of a trilogy, following Pawn and preceding Queen. The ending isn’t quite a cliffhanger, but it doesn’t resolve much of anything.

Timothy Zahn’s premise is that several humans and various aliens are enslaved on a two-mile long ship. Sometimes the Shipmasters have different species fight each othe using relatively harmless weapons (like paintballl guns) in different kinds of arenas. When aliens fight well, the Shipmasters sell the location of their planet to other aliens, who can capture slaves from that planet for use as fodder in combat.

The ship is having problems, probably because enslaving people wasn't its original mission, although what that mission might have been has yet to be revealed. A human named Nicole Lee is tasked with watching over the ship. She was promoted from Sybil to Protector, a position that requires the ship (but not the Shipmasters) to give her commands some deference. To maximize her communication with the ship, she has to ingest chemicals through an inhaler that will shorten her lifespan.

The ship is divided into quadrants. The Shipmasters seem to be in control of one quadrant but less in control of the others. Nicole’s assigned task is to maintain and protect the ship, but her self-assigned task is to convince the Shipmasters that humans are lousy fighters and therefore not worth kidnapping as warrior-slaves. That plan doesn’t work out quite the way Nicole intends.

Aliens enslaving humans is standard space opera fare. The story is moderately interesting but probably not worthy of a trilogy. Some of Nicole’s adventures as she wanders through the ship, trying to figure out what’s what and intervening in arena battles, come across as filler. The alien races she encounters are not particularly imaginative, but the humans don’t have much personality beyond the pluckiness that we expect from sf human as they outsmart their alien captors, so it all evens out.

As an action-adventure story, Knight has modest entertainment value. Zahn keeps the action moving even when it seems to be moving in circles, biding time until the story gets around to advancing. The middle novels of trilogies often come across as bridges between two better novels, and that is probably the case with Knight. It might be more fair to review the trilogy as a whole, but the third novel isn’t out yet, so I have to give the second one, standing on its own, a thumbs sideways.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

A Call to Duty by David Weber and Timothy Zahn

Published by Baen on October 7, 2014

The formula for military science fiction follows a predictable arc. The typical story tracks a young man or woman from recruitment to training to war to an ultimate act of heroism. A Call to Duty departs from the formula in some respects by glossing over recruitment and training and focusing instead on the impact of politics on the novel's protagonist. That twist on the formula makes A Call to Duty more interesting than conventional military sf.

Travis "Stickler" Long joins the Royal Manticoran Navy to put discipline into a life that has none. He is called "Stickler" because of his adamant insistence on following military rules. Much of the story's interest comes from the ethical dilemmas he encounters as his desire to obey rules conflicts with friendships and with the pragmatic need to carry out his duty when strict adherence to rules would hinder his ability to succeed.

When the story isn't following Travis, it focuses on the political conflict between Manticore's military and something that is more akin to a spacefaring Coast Guard, tasked with the protection and rescue of merchant ships close to home. Travis' half-brother, Gavin Winterfall, a minor Baron, is recruited by his political betters to support a project to convert old battleships into new, smaller corvettes that will be no longer belong to the Navy. This leads to a political competition that provides much of the story's meat.

The novel's other political element concerns a trade convention on the planet Haven, a leading supplier of military ships. Representatives of various worlds attend the meeting, including poor worlds that can't quite afford warships but still want to protect their merchant ships from piracy. Yet Haven has a hidden agenda, as do the people who want to crash the party so that they can steal a couple of Haven's ships.

A Call to Duty is plot-driven science fiction. It tells a good story while giving only modest attention to character development. That's a common and not particularly troubling problem -- a good story might be enough to ask for in genre fiction -- but the novel would have been better if the characters had been vested with more complex personalities. The last part of the novel is filled with the kind of action that characterizes military sf. It is a little too predictable but reasonably exciting. This is a better political novel than it is an action novel, but the two forms blend nicely.

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Soulminder by Timothy Zahn

Published by Open Road Media on September 23, 2014

Jessica Sands and Adrian Sommer are trying to trap the life forces (or souls) of people as they die. Preserving a soul, Sommer thinks, might allow its return to a body that is not beyond repair. When the technology finally works, they find they've created a resurrection machine -- or maybe the ticket to immortality -- but they fail to foresee all the ways in which their creation will be misused.

The technology here seems suspiciously shaky but I'm not a neuroscientist so I was willing to let that slide. The notion of a soul (or life force) that can be trapped seems equally shaky but that's the premise so I was willing to let that slide also. As long as I can swallow the story, my concern is whether the story is any good. Timothy Zahn has crafted an adequate story, although the novel suffers from being scattered.

A popular televangelist, confident that souls exist, is equally confident that mortals like Sommer and Sands should not be messing with them. Religious and ethical discussions about whether God objects to using technology to save lives follow paths charted by the stem cell debates. It eventually becomes apparent that souls can be returned not just to their own bodies, but to any soulless body, which raises all sorts of interesting ethical issues. The possibility of gaining immortality by repeatedly entering new bodies is an obvious one, but what will people give up in exchange for that opportunity? Other uses for the technology include allowing the soul from a murder victim to inhabit a living body long enough to testify against the murderer, allowing disabled people to occupy a living body temporarily or a soulless dead body permanently, and renting out a living body to other living people who want to use it to experience vicarious thrills without putting their own bodies at risk.

All of these (and a few others) are interesting ideas with ethical implications that Zahn explores in enough detail to provoke some serious thought. Like all technologies, the soulminder is capable of being abused, particularly to benefit the rich while exploiting the poor (the most likely to rent out their bodies), but this technology raises more concerns than most. Soulminder, for instance, allows the government to torture a suspect to death, to revive the corpse, and to cause death by torture again and again. If a government has that ability, you know it will eventually use it. Zahn deserves credit for thinking through the many ways his imagined technology might be used and misused.

My complaint about Soulminder, other than its slow start, is that it tends to bounce from one ethical issue to another, from character to character, in a disjointed plot that never permits the full development of any storyline. That makes Soulminder more intellectually than emotionally satisfying, although a satisfying resolution adds some cohesion to the story. Another novel that explores the separation of body and soul, Ian Watson's Deathhunter, is a better literary effort with stronger characters and equally intriguing discussions of philosophy. I nonetheless recommend Soulminder to science fiction fans who want to take a break from space opera and more conventional sf themes.

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