Review: Bloodhype, Alan Dean Foster

[jeriendhal]

Summary: When the carnivorous and thoroughly imperialistic AAnn find a mysterious, world circling lifeform called the Vom, they transport it to their nearest imperial enclave on the Humanx Commonwealth world of Repler for study. unfortunately the Vom also studies while it gathers strength and plots to escape.

Meanwhile, oversexed Jane Bond wannabe United Church agent Kitten Kai-Sung and her Tolian partner Porsupah are on the trail of the manufacturers of Bloodhype, a drug so powerful and addictive that the smallest dose could mean eventual death. Along the way they're helped by Mal Hammurabi, a freighter captain who finds a shipment of Bloodhype in his cargo, and mysterious young man with a pet flying snake...


Review: This is one of the weirder books in the Flinx series, given that he shows up about halfway through and plays a minor role at best. He's overshadowed by Hammurabi and Kitten, the latter probably holding the unfortunate distinction of being the most irritating female character Foster has ever written. Which is doubly weird because in the Audible Recorded Books intro he claims he let her take over the story when it originally started as a more Flinx oriented novel. She proves to be totally incompetent at her job, getting captured three times in course of her duties by the bad guys, and isn't defined by much more than an argumentive personality and a tendency to screw anything on two feet, which even her partner calls her out on.

Honestly, the most likeable characters in the book are the AAnn, who may bring a deadly alien monster to Repler and like to consider the possibilities of tasty human flesh, but act reasonably cautious (with one major exception) and despise drug pushers.

Comments

[seawasp]

I actually enjoyed this novel a great deal. The duel between the Vom, the Guardian, and -- at the end -- Flinx is one of the most awe-inspiring mental duels I've ever seen in print. The plotline and the general concepts involved worked well for me. I didn't find Kitten so annoying as you did, though.

I'm not sure but what this might have been the FIRST Flinx novel I read, and I then got the others because I had no idea who this guy was.

[jeriendhal.livejournal.com]

I actually enjoyed it a lot when I first read it as a teenager (I started on the Flinx stories with The End of the Matter, which is really taking things backwards), but it just didn't seem to age well to my older eyes. Kitten's actions are obviously supposed to come across as belonging to free spirited, snarky personality, but they just come across as irritating. Though the terrible pseudo-Irish accent the (male) narrator gave her probably didn't help either.

And I can't imagine any modern sci-fi author getting away with giving the heroine a spanking at the end... 0_0

[seawasp]

Hm? Oh, you were listening to this as an audiobook? I was trying to figure out where the heck she got an Irish accent from, since the book certainly doesn't imply she has any accent.

I actually thought that the Captain was the real hero, with Kitten and Porsupah being the comedy relief and Flinx playing the part of the quiet mysterious stranger. The spanking actually seemed to hearken back to a similar scene in The Witches of Karres, though with a layer of sexuality that wasn't in THAT scene. (Though since Goth is evidently going to marry the Captain in Witches eventually...)