Lallia

My Amazon review - http://www.amazon.com/review/R96M6BVGW4ECV/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm

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It seems that the cliches and tropes that define the Dumarest cycle are coming together in this book. We have Earl Dumarest on his quest for Earth and getting a scant clue that might propel him forward. We have the one-dimensional characters acting as a foil for Dumarest's quest. We have the greed and stupidity that kill people through indifference and oversight. We have Dumarest knowing on first inspection who is the fool and who he should ally with. We have Dumarest's speed and ruthlessness. But, now, for the first time, we have Dumarest learning the significance of the ring he received two books back, which, if you've read the latter books, you know, holds the secret of the affinity twin, which the Cyclan want ever so desperately.

The book starts with the normal Hobbesianism of the Dumarestiverse - life being particularly nasty, bitter and short there - with a spacer being brained in a bar on Aarn. Dumarest doesn't hesitate to intuit that this means a job has opened up somewhere. He uses the opportunity to sign on with the most-run down ship in the Web - that portion of the galaxy where Dumarest happens to be this time.

The story is set on the ship with some time-off for adventures on various planets. It is stipulated that the ship is run-down and the captain and crew is on the edge.The ship takes passengers and freight as it can. One passenger is a portly gem merchant who seems helpful.

On a religiously backward planet, Dumarest fights for the life of the title character, Lallia. She's clairvoyant, which can happen in the Dumarestiverse. She, of course, immediately falls in love with Dumarest, declares herself married to him for as long as she wants, and casually offers to others challenges that he will fight to the death on a wager.

My distaste with this book comes from this character. Lallia is by turns too weak and submissive, and, then, too conniving and egocentric. Obviously, Lallia is the trope of the femme fatale and that is the role staked out for her by Film Noir potboilers and detective stories. In my first entry in this series of reviewing my way through the Dumarestiverse, I compared Dumarest to Phil Marlow. [See The Winds of Gath: The Dumarest Saga Book 1.] If Dumarest is Marlow, then he has to have his fair share of “dames” who love him but are always looking out for number one.

The final score is Dumarest ends up in a fight to death for Lallia, a fight to the death with some kind of space beast, and a fight to the death with an agent of the Cyclan. He barely survives being shipwrecked. He finds out about the “affinity twin formula” in his ring. He gets a clue from a shipmate that directs him to the “Original People” who fled “terror.”

Does he survive? Does the story come to an end.

I won't tell you, but this is book six of thirty-one.

Dumarest of Terra is a 33-volume series of science fiction novels by Edwin Charles Tubb. Each story is a self-contained adventure, but throughout the series, Earl Dumarest, the protagonist, searches for clues to the location of his home world, Earth. Production of a television version of the series is set to begin in 2018.

The stories are set in a far future galactic culture that is fragmented and without any central government. Dumarest was born on Earth, but had stowed away on a spaceship when he was a young boy and was caught. Although a stowaway discovered on a spaceship was typically ejected to space, the captain took pity on the boy and allowed him to work and travel on the ship. When the story opens in The Winds of Gath, Dumarest has traveled so long and so far that he does not know how to return to his home planet and no-one has ever heard of it, other than as a myth or legend.

It becomes clear that someone or something has deliberately concealed Earth's location. The Cyclan, an organization of humans surgically altered to be emotionless (known as Cybers), and on occasion able to link with the brains of previously living Cybers (the better to think logically), seem determined to stop him from finding Earth. Additionally, the Cyclan seeks a scientific discovery that Dumarest possesses, stolen from them and passed to him by a dying thief, which would vastly increase their already considerable power.

Also appearing in many of the books is the humanitarian Church of Universal Brotherhood. Its monks are spread throughout many worlds as are the Cyclan, the two being arch-enemies - which does not make the Church Dumarest's ally, but in some instances they support each other.

In Lallia, Dumarest joins the crew of a small space ship. This ship, the Moray, is bad news. The ship's captain tries to make a profit by carrying cargo and passengers between planets, but they are just barely getting by, and don't even have the money to keep the ship clean and properly maintain its systems. Tubb pithily characterizes each member of the doomed Moray's crew; the captain, who is horrified of space and indulges in the use of an alien symbiote that provides him vivid dreams, the dipsomaniac engineer who puts everyone at risk by getting drunk when he should be carefully tending to the sensitive hyperspace drive, the naive young steward who doesn't know what he has gotten himself into by signing up.

Another solid Dumarest adventure; interesting characters, strange creatures and technology, plenty of violence and tragedy.