As I have mentioned numerous times on this blog, I have been reading (and just finished) the Founding of the Commonwealth trilogy, by Alan Dean Foster, and I suppose its prequel, Nor Crystal Tears.
When I began my SF reading project for this year and this blog I did not intend to read trilogies. But this one is so good - delightful actually - that I just couldn’t help myself.
How to talk about his without spoilers?
Well, first, I want to say that Foster’s characters are sooooooo not what you expect them to be. Human or alien, they are all unique and rich. In these relatively short novels, Foster manages to really develop nearly everyone and give them motivations you might not expect. In particular, the Thranx characters are really wonderful. Given the premise of insectoid aliens who evolved from a hive structure, a lazy writer might give them very rigidly defined personalities. Not so here. ADF creates Thranx characters with complex motivations who act unexpectedly. You see all the diversity of personality, thought, and action in the Thranx that you would in a human character. The same holds true of the AAnn (the reptile-like aliens who tend to a be antagonists in the books).
The Founding of the Commonwealth books are fairly recent work, published in 1999, 2000, and 2002. There’s a lot in these books that speaks to current sensibilities. In particular, that idea of “shapeism” - bigotry against sentient beings because they are of a different species (or shape). As human and thranx societies struggle to find a way to meld, this bigotry plays a massive part in both civilizations.
“Good” characters do questionable or even horrible things for noble reasons, and “bad” characters act nobly for the wrong reasons. Even the AAnn are not represented as being “evil,” but rather simply different. A product of their own evolution.
There’s a lot going on in these novels. Yes, there is space travel, futuristic technology, and all manner of science fiction tropes, but that makes these novels work is the quality of the writing and depth of the storytelling. It’s amazing who some of these older writers and do all this in fairly short novels.
There is a very heavy mystery left at the end of the series which I hope Alan Dean Foster will explore in an future novel.
Reading these books has given me a lot of inspiration and ideas for my Traveller RPG campaign, in particular the motivations of characters, both human and non-human.