Horror Book Reviews
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Title: Protector |
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Review of Protector
- Phssthpok the Pak had been traveling for most of his thirty-two thousand years. His mission: save, develop, and protect the group of Pak breeders sent out into space some two and a half million years before...
Brennan was a Belter, the product of a fiercely independent, somewhat anarchic society living in, on, and around an outer asteroid belt. The Belters were rebels, one and all, and Brennan was a smuggler. The Belt worlds had been tracking the Pak ship for days -- Brennan figured to meet that ship first...
He was never seen again -- at least not by those alive at the time.
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Comments for Protector
- Posted on 2008-05-11
I LOVE YOU
. . . is the last sentence of this novel, and leaves us with just the right swirl of emotion and wonder gyrating in our minds as we close the book. As others have pointed out, Niven's ideas often carried his stories - much more so than his plotting. But the plots explore the ideas in a way that is pure ambrosia for the hungry mind of a reader who enjoys having their imagination stretched. These are thought-out ideas, with ramifications that Niven presents to us quickly and succinctly. In the ancient tradition of all good reading, Niven's 'Protector' presents possibilities with implications, that have you looking up from the book for a moment, to let what you just read process in your mind.You don't just feel entertained ... you've grown. The idea that the aging process in humans is really a vestigial remnant of a metamorphosis to another form is pure Niven, and pure fascination, and just waiting to hear more about it produces enough anticipation in the reader to replace any deficits in plot. Watching a Pak mind solve problems is another of the hugely entertaining and mind-expanding aspects of this story. The Pak could have ruled the galaxy,but for their hormonal imperative to employ all of their matchless strength and intellect to just protecting their own bloodline against other Protectors. The Brennan-monster's base, Kobold, where he manipulated gravity as easily as a magnetic field,is yet another banquet of ideas. It may be that Niven's mind was so caught up in imagining these things, that his story plots were just delivery vehicles for them. But even then, there was method; once we had a Pak mind on our side -Brennan- the events of the story progress for reasons that are 10 steps ahead of us - and we enjoy playing catch-up as we read more. The details of interpersonal relationships is one place where Niven struggled as a writer - something his friend Jerry Pournelle helped with in their collaborations. But in a very real way, in a very Niven way, this novel was a story of the visceral love a transformed human had for all of his own kind. He had become a Protector. There were a lot of technical problems he had to solve, a lot of strategy to analyze, a lot of . .ideas . . for a reader to consider, but out of all the "hard scifi" there coalesced, unambiguously and poignantly, a love story.
Score: 4
- Posted on 2008-02-03
Decent fiction... great nonfiction
It's a decent SF potboiler, but I personally found it the best book about parenting I've ever read. Undergo a magical transformation that gives you amazing powers you never knew you had... but you can only use them in the service of the offspring. Yep, pretty much sums it up for me.
Too bad the "practically immortal" part is just fiction. Ah well.
Score: 4 - Posted on 2007-11-08
Good Sci-Fi with an anthropological twist that is entertaining.
Protector
I went into this book thinking that it would be the story of a really old alien who came to earth and found something in us worth saving. Boy, was I in for a surprise. The biggest was that very little time was spent with the original alien at all; in all the story was passed through three different narrators before its completion - not a challenge to the story but interesting when I had expected the main voice to stick with grandpa-ET the whole time.
What did I like about this book? I liked the fact that it recognized that people were missing something. Even though we've evolved into this form and this way of life - we are missing something; and although the author didn't put this much into words he did address it indirectly by providing the solution: we weren't always like this.
In fact, at one time we were very different from who we are now as a species, and something happened that made us lose a part of ourselves, a part that we've been missing ever since - and that msising has been gnawing away at us for some time.
I liked the book. I read it in a single sitting, so it wasn't hard to go with. It turned out well; a little lackluster as far as endings go and maybe the plot didn't move as fast as it could. The problems that characters faced were all solved without much effort or ingenuity involved on their parts, seemingly - and I didn't find myself engaged by that much. Sure there was some killing and explosions - but those aren't why I read books and they aren't that good in books anyway.
I would read it again, it was worth the $4 I paid for it buying it from Powell's in Portland, but Amazon has some great copies too I'm sure, I just didn't want to wait for them to arrive.
Good luck, and enjoy discerning if there's a little Pak in you too.
Dr. Dominic Ebacher
ebacherdom.blogspot.com
071108.0221
Score: 3
- Posted on 2007-09-23
Juvenile, but good
If you like epic SciFi with positive endings and colorful characters, which I do, this is a good book. It does suffer from "simple" logic though, but sometimes things do work out like that. I do reserve more stars for better writing though.
Score: 3 - Posted on 2007-09-03
Not Free SF Reader
The Pak protectors have both a strange physiology and psychology. They mature from the breeder stage to the very intelligent protector stage, and develop a serious protective parental impulse to go with it.
When a protector has nothing to look after, he goes on a quest for purpose, as without one, he will literally die. Enter humans and their little solar system.
Score: 4