Classic SF: Power Play, Anne McCaffrey & Elizabeth Ann Scarborough

Power Play

Anne McCaffrey & Elizabeth Ann Scarborough

ISBN: 0345388267

Read January 28, 2015
Third (final) book of the Petaybee trilogy (Powers that Be, Power Lines)

Oof.  The well water gets a bit gritty towards the bottom.  Overall storyline concludes nicely - the assholes from the two previous books hire a notorious space pirate to kidnap Yana, Marmion, Diego, and Bunny.  Meanwhile, the planet and the people on the surface (mainly Sean, Johnny, and 'Cita/Aoife/Goat-Dung/Youngling) repel invaders intent on despoiling the ample hunting grounds and medicinal biota of the planet.

Plot-devices that were faintly apparent and easy to overlook in the first books got much worse: the slang is dated and ill-used, the language (especially dialogue) is stilted and ridiculous, and situations are obviously contrived for effect rather than sense.

Despite that, and the many eye-rolls and sighs, I did enjoy reading it, and I'm glad I finished off the set.  Namid especially is a good character, and it was nice to see the religious supplicants actually being useful characters (although we never find out what happens with "Brother Granite" who isn't who he appears to be).

Also, with the epilogue, can we stop with the fantasy of women giving birth with no pain and it being a magical dreamy perfect experience that ends with them immediately rising from the birthing pool looking "flat-bellied and lithe again"?  Seriously?  It's patronizing.

Classic SF: Power Lines, Anne McCaffrey & Elizabeth Ann Scarborough

Power Lines

Anne McCaffrey & Elizabeth Ann Scarborough

ISBN: 0345387805

Read January 21, 2015
Second book of the Petaybee trilogy (Powers that Be, Power Play)

Book two of the set was as interesting, perhaps more-so than the first, but suffered from un-wrapped threads at the ending, especially regarding Shush.

Petaybee has just forced a confrontation with Intergal, and they've sent a duo of company execs to determine the best course of action to continue making money from the planet.  The lady capitalist Marmion is our added protagonist, along with Goat-Dung (good grief) and Coaxtl on the planetary side.  Our new antagonists appear in the form of the "ethnographer" Matthew Luzon, and the continuing obstruction of Torkel Whittaker from the first book.

The planet is melting, the growing season is either early or the climate is shifting, and Intergal is desperate to find pockets of colonists who don't believe Petaybee is a benevolent sentient being (since finding anyone who doesn't believe that it's sentient at all is a bust) and Luzon is off to the southern continent to find them.

There are missing siblings, miraculous rescues, pointedly-useful biota, and general asshattery from the corporation.  I thought the pacing was better, and the variety of cultures and attitudes was refreshing, but at the end, there were too many strings to tie up, and some were left to hang, or were tied up in ways that don't make sense even by the very loose plotting standard set by the rest of the book.

Still, fun to read.  I'm going to try the last, just so I can say I finished the trilogy.  

Classic SF: Powers that Be, Anne McCaffrey & Elizabeth Ann Scarborough

Powers that Be
Anne McCaffrey & Elizabeth Ann Scarborough
ISBN: 078572852X
Read January 16, 2015
First book of the Petaybee trilogy (Power Lines and Power Play)

Really more Science Fantasy than SF, this is very much like Pern in that "psy" type abilities and planetary sentience are treated as having equal possibility with space travel and terraforming.

Most extra-Solar work these days is done by Intergal, a massive company that discovers, colonizes, and exploits the resources of planets across the galaxy.  Our hero is an ex-company soldier, who was injured during a "terrorist attack" on a remote colony world.

Now she's sent to Petaybee, a small rural, backwards ice-ball of a planet, to live out her last few years on the company's dime before her injury does her in.  Except, now that she's here, would she mind horribly integrating with the locals (a bizarro mix of Inuit and Irish cultures) and spying on them because they keep obstructing company efforts to locate and mine the planet's valuable resources?  If so, she'll find that her pension is increased, and she'll get access to the company base, rather than the useless empty company store meant for the locals.

Now, she's stuck between loyalty to her employer, and a growing sense of unease that the company is about to commit a terrible moral offense against a sentient mind.

I enjoyed it enough to pick up the next, but it was a bit weak in places.  It's fairly obvious that the weird Irish/Inuit blend was the reason for the story, and everything else was sketched in to support that odd premise.  The company goons are company goons, the locals are nearly all wonderful people, and the "powers" of the planet and the genetically-altered (good lord the dithering about with genetic manipulation and genetic alteration and adaptations was enough to drive one nuts) residents were even more thinly-related to actual science than the magic dragons of the Pern books.

Fun to read for the history lesson, and to see how far the genre has come; I'm reading Ancillary Justice at the same time, and the contrast is mind-blowing.