Publisher Description
Bestselling author Alan Dean Foster returns to his acclaimed Humanx universe, where a young human orphan called Flinx seeks to unlock the dangerous secrets of his past–and the uncertain prospects of his future with the aid of the formidable minidrag known as Pip. This mind-bending Pip and Flinx adventure is a roller-coaster ride into the unknown, filled with wonder and humor, and a host of deadly adversaries.
Using his enhanced empathic abilities, Flinx finesses his way into a top-secret security installation on Earth. Once there, he bamboozles a sophisticated AI program into releasing classified information about the Meliorare Society, the sect of renegade eugenicists whose experiments with human beings had horrified the civilized universe more than twenty years ago. After all, as one of the few Meliorare experiments to survive, Flinx has a right to know about his past. Especially since his telepathic powers seem to be evolving. The question is, evolving into what? The excruciating headaches afflicting Flinx with increasing frequency make him wonder if he will be alive to find out. . . .
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Bestseller Foster has created yet another entertaining adventure story in the far-flung reaches of a far-future outer space. Featuring the Alaspinian minidrag Pip and the intellectually enhanced Phillip Lynx (Flinx), this is the seventh in an ongoing series that began with For Love of Mother Not. There are few real surprises in this nostalgic novel, as Flinx continues to pursue all sources of knowledge of his birth parents. In his quest he runs into previously introduced nemeses like the alien AAnn and another genetically enhanced person like himself, the adolescent woman Mahnahmi, who turns out to be more closely linked and more dangerous than was previously revealed. He finds he has unsuspected allies, including intelligent vegetal life and a souped-up spaceship, all the bases of plots from earlier novels. The penultimate adventure links Flinx with a huge alien artifact on the moon of a distant planet, Pyrassis, always an appealing adventure-plot element. There, after hardship and seemingly certain extinction, he communes with the alien intelligence and plants the seeds (remember the intelligent plants?) that alert us to the possibility of future exploits. Using the traditional cliff-hangers and narrow escapes of classic SF adventure page-turners, and propelling Flinx from one crisis to another, from moral dilemma to deus-ex-machina, Foster enlists multiple formulas for a surefire, if comfortably predictable, reading experience that should appeal to space-opera fans. FYI:Foster is also known for his novelizations of such films asStar Wars, the first threeAlien pictures andAlien Nation. His novel Cyber War won the Southwest Book Award for Fiction in 1990, the first science fiction work ever to do so.
