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Title: Radiant
Score:
Author: James Alan Gardner
Rating: Not available
Hits: 102

Review of Radiant

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Comments for Radiant

• Posted on 2009-08-07
  Another great adventure of Festina Ramos!
  
  _Radiant_ is yet another excellent installment in the League of Peoples books by James Alan Gardner, easily one of the best if not the best. I would recommend reading the other books in the series first but if one doesn't I don't believe it would be too confusing.
  
  Unlike some of the more recent volumes, particularly _Trapped_, our heroine of the entire series, Admiral Festina Ramos, has a major starring role almost from the beginning. True to form to the other volumes however the narrator is a person that that book has introduced. Our other hero this time around is a member of the Explorer Corps as well, a woman by the name of Youn Suu from the planet Anicca, a Buddhist planet settled by people from Southeast Asia. Like other members of the Explorer Corps, her brilliant mind, a non-hazardous and non-handicapping deformity, and her lack of acceptance of society drove her into the Explorer Corps.
  
  At the start of the book Youn Suu is serving on the Technocracy ship _Pistachio_ with her Explorer Corp partner, Tut (a remarkable and unique individual). The ship is dispatched to free a Cashling planet (the Cashling being a whiney, can-barely-do-anything-for-themselves, hedonistic species introduced earlier in the series) from the Balrog, an enigmatic, powerful alien that superficially resembles red moss but known by Festina and others to be incredibly intelligent, calculating, and powerful. The red moss has thoroughly engulfed one of the Cashling cities, a place by the name of Zoonau, leading the aliens to scream for protection from the Technocracy. Knowing that the Balrog won't knowingly harm let alone kill anyone, its massive presence is nonetheless unwelcome. The _Pistachio_ is dispatched to deal with the situation.
  
  It soon turns out that the Balrog were basically acting as they did, when and where they did, to engineer so that both Youn Suu and Festina Ramos would be at the same place and at the same time along with the Balrog, both being needed to deal with a far greater crisis; a request to rescue colonists on the world of Muta, a world being explored and tentatively settled by the Technocracy's chief rival, the Unity. The world was once known to have been inhabited by the Fuentes (also introduced earlier in the series), a race that around the human year 4000 BC ascended to a god-like non-corporeal form, having destroyed virtually all traces of their civilization, their buildings, structures, roads, everywhere they existed. Except on Muta.
  
  The planet attracted first one race known as the Greenstriders, a race - in a move very much out of character for the species - that sold the planet to the Unity. Something it seems had not only scared the Greenstriders into selling this world (they were otherwise never, ever known to part with land once they acquired it) but also destroyed apparently in a matter of seconds every single Unity outpost. All contact was lost and attempts to reestablish it had not been successful.
  
  What caused their sudden disappearance (all the more remarkable when a survey from orbit reveals no physical destruction to their campsites)? Festina, Youn Suu, and Tut investigate, uncovering the answers to mysteries both ancient and modern. There is lots of action in the book, more than in some of the earlier volumes, and the mystery that unfolds in _Radiant_ ties into larger issues of the history and cosmology of the League of Peoples universe.
  
  This I think is the arguably the best book of the series, much better than the earlier volume _Trapped_. Gardner continues to impress me as a writer and I hope that others discover him as well.
  
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• Posted on 2009-06-26
  I found this book to be a disappoint chapter in the Leage series
  
  
  In the previous books (Expendable, Ascending, etc) I found Festina to be smart, couragous and likeable. In this book, what are her accomplishments?
  
  1) She breaks the legs of a partner she distrusts when the partner comes to ask for Festina's help in rescuing another explorer. Festina does this without asking one question about why she is there.
  
  2) Festina unplugs a machine.
  
  I was undershelmed. Oh yea, she also fought a dinosaur well. This is not the Festina I miss from the other books. I also found the main character to be a bit on the "feel sorry for myself" side.
  
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• Posted on 2006-10-16
  Radiant shines nicely
  
  This was a light and pleasurable read this weekend, the latest in James Alan Gardner's "expendable" universe. I read the first novel when it initially came out several years ago and then failed to notice the intervening releases. I was pleasantly surprised, when I started reading this one, that missing the in-between novels didn't affect my enjoyment of this book.
  
  The "expendable" universe is one where humanity has ventured to the stars and promptly found that there are many alien cultures out there, most of which are far more advanced than man. These cultures have a rule against killing sentient life. If you do it, and then try to leave your solar system, you are zapped as a " dangerous non-sentient". Humanity splits into two cultures, the Technocracy and the Unity, one averse to tinkering with genes and the other gung-ho about it. Nicely though, unlike most of our history, these two cultures don't fight each other....since doing so would get them all erased as non-sentients....they just kind of bicker like a divorced couple.
  
  In this novel, Ugly Screaming Stink-Baby, otherwise known as Youn Sue, is a 19 year old cadre of the Explorers, an arm of the Technocracy Navy. the Explorers are scouts that are sent ahead of the regular Navy to explore new worlds, and to determine all the myriad things that can kill people on them. Think of the expendable ensigns on the old Star Trek shows and you'll get the idea. Actually, that probably is where Gardner got the idea. Naturally the mortality rate within this elite group is high; so the technocracy response i sto satff the Explorers only with humans that are disfigured. Thse people are considered expendable.
  
  In this delightful tale, Youn Sue, a Buddhist, is first infected by a red, spore like sentience that calls itself the Balrog, and which is far smarter than any human. She then is called to rescue a group of Unity Scouts along with the indomitable Admiral Ramos and another explorer, Tut. The Unity scouts, although dispersed around the planet, all disappeared at once and the Explorer's are the closest group when the mayday comes in. They must solve the puzzle of the missing scouts and determine why the Balrog attacked Youn Sue, while fending off velociraptors on an archaelogical mystery planet. This book was a lot of fun and perfect light reading on a weekend when I had the flu. It's not destined to be a sci-fi classic but I did enjoy reading it.
  
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• Posted on 2005-11-23
  Provocative
  
  "Radiant," James Alan Gardner's latest in his "Expendable" Universe (the Expendables are disposable members of the explorer corps who are flawed aesthetically and whose lives are therefore less valued), is a blend of the standard "survey-team in trouble" story with a riff on the nature of the hero, as contrasted in Western and Eastern cultures. Gardner has a great idea: as he says in his introduction: "I'm tired of melting-pot futures where all the cultural differences have been homogenized into some lukewarm vanilla snooze."
  
  "Radiant" is anything but that, with its two heroines, Youn Suu (representing the Buddhist East) and Festina Ramos (representing the cowboy West). And then there's the bizarrely annoying holy fool Tut, the jester with a thousand faces.
  
  But you don't need a PhD to enjoy "Radiant." There's plenty of action, as the explorers have to figure out what happened on a world suddenly deserted. Prodded along by the presence of the Balrog, a mosslike hive-mind culture, the explorers, who turn out to be far from expendable, find the answer, and Mr. Gardner expands the limits of contemporary sf.
  
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• Posted on 2005-03-11
  Better than I Expected..!
  
  Well, I'm really liked it..the early books Expendable,Vigilant,Hunted,Ascending & Trapped..!
  so I was looking forward to Radiant.. and the book was better than I expected..yes! perhaps with silly ideas at times but now with an bit more than that..with the philosophy/religion/culture debate between the characters and also an few interesting civilizations..! an very good fun read..!
  
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