A Son of the Rock

Berkley Books, 1982, 429 p.

“Dana Ikoro, smuggler, stood facing Monk the drug courier across the floor of the starship Treasure.”

So begins this novel, the second have read by this author – and almost certainly the last.

More or less from the start of this I felt soiled by reading it. Not by the writing, even though it has to be said it is not the best crafted of works (that “smuggler” in the first sentence is an especially awkward piece of journalese, Ikoro’s occupation ought to be introduced to us much more subtly,) but by its content. We are implicitly asked to sympathise with a drug-runner as protagonist and later, by extension, with slave-holders – and therefore the system of slavery as a whole. Even worse, the character in the book who works most against the institution of slavery, indeed plots to overthrow it, Michel A-Rae, is presented as deranged.

Given these reservations I suppose the plot is well-enough worked out, the human motivations reasonable enough – though another of the main characters is a psychopath with incestuous leanings, which is a bit extreme. The writing, though, is passable at best with the info-dumping being particularly crude and intrusive.

As background we are told that centuries ago aliens had come to Earth and handed over hyperdrive equations and hence access to the galaxy. Moreover, “Repossessed of a frontier, humans set out to …. and to colonize (sic) the stars.” I note that humans here seems to refer only to those feeling the loss of a frontier. That’s me – and billions of others – counted out. Lynn goes on, “In most colonies criminals were either killed or ostracised,” (harsh) but one, Chabad, set itself up as a planet which would take offenders from the local sector, Sardonyx, and keep them as slaves. Hence the need for dorazine to pacify them.

Main viewpoint character Dana Ikoro has had his cargo of dorazine stolen from him by another drug-runner who turned up at the drop-off before him with the correct access code. This leads to a desperate attempt by him to rescue the situation by travelling to the planet Chabad, the sole market for dorazine, where it is used to the slaves submissive. He is apprehended and convicted (the evidence on his ship of dorazine storage suffices to incriminate him of smuggling) and enslaved on Chabad to the Yago family where he gets involved peripherally in the dynastic affairs of Chabad’s four ruling families and Rhani Yago’s schemes to gain direct access to the manufacture and supply of dorazine as well as Michel A-Rae’s plots.

Once again, and despite the appearance here of computers and something which is very much like Skype or Zoom but more akin to a video analogue of a phone call, we have tapes as the information storage medium of choice. The future is always different in ways unforeseen.

Pedant’s corner:- ostenstatiously (ostentatiously,) “permission to birth” (berth, spelled correctly later.) “They landed on Chabat” (rest of sentence was in present tense; ‘They land on Chabad,) hiccoughed (hiccuped,) Nexus’ (Nexus’s – every name ending in “–s” is treated with –s’ instead of –s’s to denote a possessive,) “she lifted a hand to wave him to her” (to wave to him.) “None of its citizens are free.” (None … is free.) Sherrix’ (Sherrix’s,) we are twice told that in a bar the first drink is free, (that only needs one mention,) there’s supposed to be a curfew on slaves but in a bar on a mission for his owner Ikoro “could see the lights of Abanat” hence it must be nighttime, but could wait “three hours more,” torques (torcs,) staunch (stanch,) “beneath his uxorious facade she sensed intelligence, caution, and malice” (uxorious means “excessively or submissively fond of a wife” which doesn’t make sense here, and there was no wife mentioned,) “there are facts that neither you nor any other Chabadese resident knows” (know,) “‘The dorazine formula is a carefully guarded secret’” (this is supposed to be the future. Are chemical analysis labs defunct, then? The formula for a drug is relatively easy to decipher, and was so even in 1982,) Enchantanter (Enchanter,) “‘labs have been unable to analyze [sic] the drug or discover how it is made’” (see comment above,) “it acquired gravity” (??? The mind boggles.) None of them were especially heavy” (None … was … heavy,) “in the way Ramas-I-Occad has been reticent” (had been,) distrubance (disturbance,) a missing end quotation mark after a piece of dialogue.