The Game of Stars and Comets
By Andre Norton
Baen, $14.00, 518 pages
In this collection of four novels set in the same universe by a SFWA Grand Master, the author repeatedly reflects on the great clash of civilizations and personal identity. In The Sioux Spaceman, Kade Whitehawk must bring his knowledge of plains culture into the far reaches of space to a subjugated race of aliens that need to remove their shackles. Eye of the Monster forces Rees Naper to run hard and fast in a race to save others from a native race of aliens suddenly turned hostile. Diskan Fentress must use his mutant powers to stop space pirates from destroying a culture they cannot understand in The X Factor. Voor is afflicted by a plague called the Shadow Death in Voorloper and it is up to three survivors to solve the crisis. In each of these narratives Norton creates grand worlds of strange delights and bizarre civilizations. At the individual level, each protagonist must work within the strangeness of the world to find who he or she is as a human. Norton makes the tales of this collection both sweepingly epic and extremely personal, providing the reader with wonderfully grand visions and significant emotional connections to people not so very different from us, even across the vastness of space and time.
Reviewed by John Ottinger III
