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Conrad's Quest for Rubber | Rating | |
| D | |||
| Leo Frankowski | |||
| Series | Related Books | ||
| The Adventures of Conrad Stargard | The Cross-Time Engineer, The High-Tech Knight, The Radiant Warrior, The Flying Warlord, Lord Conrad's Lady, Conrad's Quest for Rubber | ||
Every time I read this book or even see it on my shelf, I get a mental image of someone frantically driving all over town late at night, looking for a drugstore that is actually open so he can buy a prophelactic. I'm serious. Every single time.
The plot is pretty basic: Duke Conrad is managing his empire, but in order to make it grow he needs to explore. So he sets up the Exploration Corps. And in order to keep progressing technologically, he needs rubber, so he sends an expedition to the Amazon basin.
But the problems don't end with the unfortunate title. Like all books in the series except the first, the novel is read from more than one point of view: Conrad's, and one of his subject's. But unlike the other books, this one is mostly from the subject's journal, and not Conrad's. More, this particular man we met only briefly in one scene in book four. We know him not at all. Partially for this reason, the summation of the other books runs long. But then it just keeps summing up the other books! It's kind of nice to see the war with the mongols from another perspective, but it's not eighty pages worth of nice!
The core of the new stuff is in exploration. First we get an expedition to the arctic circle, but not much happens. Only after all this, with less than a hundred pages left in the book, do we go to the Amazon. But not much happens there, either. Josip meets strange people, sees strange cultures, and gets sick with malaria.
The sickness is what absolutely kills this book. Why? Because Conrad is so upset about unleashing European diseases on the Americas, and so worried about reciprocal plagues, that he actually asks for help from the future. And he gets it! In the worst case of deus ex machina I have ever seen, he gets a miracle cure-all from his cousin Tom, who runs the Historical Corps. It absolutely shortcuts all the problems we had to go through. The plagues would have been nasty, they would have hurt, but it would have been done and over with. It would have made a great story to watch him struggle to keep Poland and the new Christian Federation running as people are dropping dead. Instead his world is now stuck taking this Cure every year, planetwide, for the rest of history. To do otherwise would let illness spread out of its established zones.
Good freaking grief. What a cheat.
If there is a book seven, it had darn well better be about the next war with the Mongols. It had been revealed in book five that they had captured some of Conrad's equipment, so there is a chance it won't be the one-sided slaughter the last war was. And Conrad has vowed to go east and root them out of Asia. But if the story is anything but that... well, there's no challenge left!
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