A Son of the Rock

Tor, 2009, 407p.

The usual caveat applies to this review.

This is the second adventure featuring Dakota Merrick; first introduced to us in Stealing Light (see link above.) We also meet our old friend – foe, really – Trader in Faecal Matter of Animals, one of the Shoal, a civilisation of water breathing creatures who dominate most of the human area of space and restrict access to it. (Another Shoal has the slightly more agreeable name Swimmer in Turbulent Currents.)

The title Nova War is a bit of a misnomer as the greater part of the book concerns Dakota’s travails in escaping (or not) from the clutches of various Hives of Bandati – winged, social-insect type creatures by whom she is imprisoned when the book starts. It is not till later (and mostly off-stage) that any interplanetary conflict occurs.

The earlier sections at first seemed to be symptomatic of middle-part-of-trilogy malaise but once Dakota is free of the Hives the action picks up. Dakota also comes into conflict with the Shoal’s main adversaries the Emissaries, an elephantine race with a peculiar religious obsession and extremely loud voices, who were only given brief mentions in the previous book.

While Gibson mostly avoids the troubles inherent in a sequel of telling us once more of prior events – more or less by the commendable expedient of ignoring any need to do so – there is a deal of info dumping and some episodes tend to be related rather than revealed. Also, the relaying of simultaneous events occurring to different characters is sometimes out of kilter.

Nova War, while depicting less overt violence than the previous volume in the sequence, keeps the pot set up in Stealing Light boiling nicely.

The third book of the Shoal sequence, Empire Of Light, comes out later this year.