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Pretender | Rating | |
| D | |||
| Piers Anthony and Frances Hall | |||
| Series | Related Books | ||
| N/A | N/A | ||
NK-2, an energy being, is in trouble. His ship is badly damaged, forcing him to stop at a little backwater planet where the galactics have a repair station. Earth, of course, in the time of Babylon. But the repair station is destroyed, possibly by humans and possibly by enemy action. And through its own carelessness, NK-2 must abandon his host body and take up a human host so it can search for station A-10.
The writing is not bad, not bad at all. But it's not very interesting. Enkidu, the new human host, searches for his god, "Aten," but it's frighteningly mundane. NK-2 has few abilities, and never even communicates directly with its host, much less take over and make him do something. All it can do is impress ideas, and sometimes he can't even do that very well. It can also "extend his penumbra" to check for others of his kind.
Overall, neither of those is especially useful. NK-2 is too paranoid or frightened to extend its aura unless its absolutely sure the enemy being is not nearby, which makes things complicated. Much more complicated than it needed to be. It gets frustrating when so many questions could be answered so quickly if it would just take a risk, but it refuses to do so. Instead it thinks and doublethinks and triplethinks itself into doing nothing.
As a result, the book is much longer than it needs to be. Enkidu spends a hundred pages - 40% of the book! - in a jail cell awaiting torture. Instead of spending the time trying to figure out how to escape - he decides that's impossible fairly early in his stay - he spends it carrying on a days-long conversation with the person in the next cell over. But first, dozens of pages are spent on figuring out how to get that communication going. Readers really do not need to see every deduction about how to pull out bricks and everything else; just say how it was done, say it took a week to actually do, and then get to the conversation.
And the whole time he's in the cell, the energy being can do some checking, but is too scared to do so. It makes those hundred pages one big sideshow.
The story could have, should have been about flushing the enemy from the planet. Instead we get this entirely mundane search for a "god" and its secret cult, with lots of thinking but little doing. NK-2's paranoia just gets irritating. (Is that the enemy? He might be because... and he might not be because... What about her? Is it her?) We don't even know what the two sides are fighting over!
And as a last note, the back of the book is just plain wrong. Enkidu is no "spear thrust at the heart of Babylon." And he shows no sign of "becoming a god." Maybe in the sequel, since this story is not complete. But not in this one. And I'm not too interested in finding out if that's how things develop.
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