"An Auspicious Debut for Series"

One of my favorite subdivisions of the vast sf field is what I call the "culture-dependent" story--one that takes place on an alien world and turns upon the differences between its native race and humanity. It's not an easy type to write convincingly, because a human author naturally tends to think like a human, and up to now there are only two--C. J. Cherryh and Poul Anderson--whom I've found really capable of getting into an alien's skin and viewing the Universe through its eyes (and sometimes other senses). With "Black on Black," new author Wentworth, like Superman clearing a tall building, joins this auspicious company in a single bound.

Ranger Sgt. Heyoka Blackeagle, his name to the contrary, is not an Oglala Sioux (though he was reared by one), but a hrinn--a lupine type of nonhuman, seven feet tall, with an all-over coat of black fur, two thumbs on each hand, and retractible claws on every digit. Invalided out of the Service after sustaining a leg wound in the ongoing war against the insectoid flek, he makes up his mind to visit his homeworld, Anktan, for the first time in his conscious memory (his foster father rescued him from a slave pen when he was little more than an infant), and try to find his roots. His human partner, Cpl. Mitsu Jensen, is due a leave and goes with him.

His initial contact with other hrinnti is both confusing and dismaying: they take him for an "Outsider" and "one of the Dead" (their name for anyone with an alien smell), yet at least some of them seem to attach great importance to his coloring--solid black outer- and undercoats, with not a speck of other hue (hence the title of the book). Gradually he discovers that he may be the last survivor of the Levv, a Line that was destroyed by an alliance of hrinnti for supposed infractions of the species' social code at about the time of his birth; that his coming has been the subject of prophecy--and that something very peculiar is going on at the local Confederation base.

When Mitsu is captured by one of the hrinn Lines, then mysteriously vanishes after supposedly being returned to her own kind, it's up to Heyoka to weld the quarrelsome Lines--dominated by females--and the males' houses into a single force that can somehow prevent the flek from completing the transport grid they've been secretly constructing in the back country for over 30 years. If he fails, his people will be destroyed, their world remade to suit flek ideas of perfection, and the enemy will have a staging area from which to strike at dozens of nearby planets.

For all his alienness, Heyoka is a sympathetic character whose feelings of rootlessness in a human culture and struggle to repress "the other who lives inside him" echo the frequent literary theme of alienation. And the hrinnti, though hardly the most sympathetic nonhuman race in sf--with their savage quarrelsomeness and lack of any concept of friendship or family--are fascinating in their gradually revealed history, their fixation on what they call "patterns," and their image of the godhead, which they call "the Voice."

Wentworth slips readily from human to hrinnti viewpoint, and when reading chapters written in the latter, it's easy to forget that this is a fictional people invented by a human. What resolves the story is the ability of some hrinnti, Heyoka among them, to "use power"-- somehow storing and channelling a kind of cosmic electricity through their own cells: a concept that is, to the best of my knowlege, completely new to the genre.

If you enjoy adventures on distant worlds and like to meet new species, "Black on Black" is your kind of book.

Reviewed by Christine Jeffords
Posted August 11, 2002