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Books, Pretender
 

You know about them scruffy aliens?

a book review by Eric Jackson

Pretender

by C. J. Cherryh

Daw, New York (2005)

400 pages, $8.95 in paperback

ISBN 13:978-0-7564-0408-6

You know about them scruffy foreigners? Well Tabini, the aiji, apparently doesn't.

Not only did he promote a scruffy foreigner from a lowly post as interpreter to become his top advisor --- it wasn't one of those garden variety scruffy foreigners, but a space alien. And not only a space alien, but one that has taken a liking to one of the local women, a member of the powerful and prestigious Assassins Guild.

That would be scandalous enough, but the aiji has taken the alien's advice and pursued some disruptive and unpopular development policies, and made the guy tutor to the heir to the throne.

All of which adds up to a pretty good pretext for a coup, which has taken place.

Ah, but the new claimant to the aijinate hasn't managed to bump off his opposition, and this is a political thriller about the counter-coup.

C. J. Cherryh is a wonderful writer who rose to prominence in the science fiction world after the revolution of the 60s, when the genre emerged out of its previous pulp space opera cocoon as a full-blown serious literary form --- even if the Hollywood people tended to either choose the trash or trash the good stuff.

This novel, part of the Foreigner series, probably wouldn't appeal to Hollywood. There's only one big explosion and the chase scene is kept reasonably non-harrowing by the assassins' nimble advance work. This is a political thriller, not Dirty Harry set in outer space. As in a good read for intelligent people.

Good science fiction in any language is hard to come by in Panama, and it gets here a bit later than to most of the English-speaking world. Lucky for us, some buyer brought this one our way, and a few copies are bound to be passed around to surprising number of members of this country's English-language science fiction underground.

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