Blood and War: The Harriers, Book II

Blood and War: The Harriers, Book II		Rating
		C
Gordon R. Dickson
Series	Related Books
The Harriers	N/A

Primitive, emergent races &mdash like humans &mdash are watched closely by the Emerging Planets Fairness Court to ensure they uphold and enact the will and philophy of the alien races already among the stars. And it is up to the Harriers to keep the peace in human space and prevent incidents that might invoke sanctions. But they find themselves having to work around the alien's and their by-the-book mentality at least as often as they work with them. Here are three stories as these elite among the stars have to perform a rescue mission in the middle of a intrahuman war, fight off a minor alien invasion, and search for missing youngsters among a primitive and protected native populace, all under the close scrutiny and disapproving eye of the Mromrosii overseers.

This isn't a man or squad or other group struggling against overwhelming odds. This is a group trying to be merely effective under an anal, topheavy bureocracy. The Mromrosi take every consideration and point of view into consideration except humanity's. And, unfortunately, I've never much been a fan of stories like this, so this book has an uphill battle ahead of it right from the start. It never does quite succeed.

The first story, by David Drake, is titled, "The Noble Savages," and the Mromrosi buy that myth whole. It seems that the less technologically advanced a race is, the less likely they are willing to consider they are doing anything at all wrong. More advanced cultures, like humanity's, are users and abusers and have nothing to offer the universe. As a result, the story is one long frustration. Concern for the environment or the natives is all well and good, but it is possible to go too far. If something is trying to eat me or the natives are chucking spears around, I'm not going to be too concerned about what the cultural or environmental impact of drawing a pistol might be. The degree to which the Mromrosii protect these things is downright insane.

There is no doubt in my mind that this is the point of this story, of course. Time and again, each story illustrates that empathy be damned, sometimes you need to stop worrying about what accidental damage you might commit and just do the job. To that end these make for decent parables, but the level of stupidity in the Mromrosii policies make the stories difficult to believe, to say the least.

For that matter, I was left pondering something of a paradox. The Mromrosi are obviously a widespread, advanced, powerful race. They must be, or humanity would have shrugged off their idiot injunctions. But if that's so, then why is humanity not considered a lesser, more primitive race, one whose culture and outlook on the universe have a right to be preserved? Why are they doing their best to stamp out in us what they so loudly respect in everyone else?

The second story ("Down Among the Dead Men," by Gordon R. Dickson and Chelsea Quinn Yarbro) avoided this problem but subsituted another. The Mromrosi were less stupid about going outside the official rulebook, but the story was long and complex. It was not long before I was lost among the enormous cast. Who is this? Is he the commander of this ship or that one, or was he on the one that crashed? Was this guy a good guy or was he on the other side? Just what is going on? There's barely enough information to understand what is happening with the plot, much less get familiar with the characters. While less aggravating than Drake's tale, this one was no less frustrating.

Meanwhile, "Mission of Mercy," by Christopher Stasheff, is as short as it gets. But it felt incomplete, rushed, as if Stasheff was trying to fit a fifty-page story into the twenty pages alotted him. And this time, there were no Mromrosi at all. while this was definitely something of a relief, it is titally at ods with the setting concept. EPFC observers accompany every mission, or so we're given to understand on the back of the book and in the other stories, and they tend to be officious busybodies that can't be ignored or shrugged off. So where were they here?

Overall, there's little background given to readers regarding how this entire situation came about. Most of the information here comes from the back cover blurb. Details are doled out in tiny snippets or not at all &mdash and usually it's the latter.

As a result, the stories are, at best, tolerable. Every story has its problems, to be sure, but once past some of them aren't difficult to overlook and even the most irritating doesn't last forever. Subjectively, I didn't much like this, and feel no real need to acquire the first collection of the series. Fans of the authors involved may be more forgiving, however, and even I had difficulty finding problems that were not of a subjective nature. The writing is on par with the writers' usual quality, for what that's worth. I have no doubt some will enjoy this book. I, however, did not.

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