The Story So Far

Life in the circus has not been very kind to Roan, but at least he has Stellaraire, his woman, and Iron Robert, a hulking Geek who is his loyal friend. Unfortunately he loses Stellaraire when the circus ship, having been mistaken for a war vessel, is attacked by pirates, with an emergency maneuver killing almost everyone aboard. Roan and Iron Robert survive to be greeted by Henry Dread and his band of merry men, although it turns out Henry is part of a fledgling Imperial Terran Navy. Earth may be blocked off from the rest of the galaxy, thanks to the Niss, but there are still humans sprinkled throughout known space. Granted, it’s rare for them to be purely human, but they appear to be human enough. Roan spends the next five years of his life aboard Henry’s ship, that being the Warlock. Henry comes to treat Roan almost like a son, but their relationship is troubled by Henry’s racism toward Geeks (non-humanoid aliens), with Iron Robert being kept locked in a cell all this time. There’s some internal conflict with what Roan wants, between sympathizing with Henry’s hopes of rebuilding the Terran empire and discovering his own origins. Where exactly did Roan come from? Who were his genetic parents? How did a precious embryo like him end up on a backwater planet like Tambool?

Unfortunately Roan’s time on the Warlock comes to about as dramatic an end as possible. They spot a Niss ship one day, and rather than retreating, being certainly outgunned, Henry thinks it’d be a great idea to go charging in head-first. The failed attack results in the Warlock getting blown to bits and Roan losing Henry and Iron Robert, the former by way of killing him (in what ends up being a totally futile action) and the latter because Iron Robert is literally too big to fit in the escape pod with the crew. With Henry having made Roan the new leader and not being so sour about the whole getting-shot-in-the-chest thing, Our Anti-Hero™ has a crew, but not a proper ship. He’s also low on friends at the moment.

Enhancing Image

The encounter with the Niss ship turns out to be an anticlimax in a way, but an interesting one, since the Niss ship is, in fact, a ghost ship (in the novel it’s written as one word). Everyone aboard, both the crew and the Terrans they were keeping as prisoners, has been dead, seemingly for a very long time. Roan and his men are able to sneak aboard, as the ship’s automatic defenses, still alert after all these years, didn’t pick up the escape pod. While the loss of the Warlock and Henry Dread are to be lamented, Roan has already started formulating a new plan. He acquires the ID of a long-dead Terran captain named Endor, and thinks it might be to his advantage if he impersonated someone who knew this captain—maybe a lieutenant. Lieutenant Roan it is. After all, it would be awkward if he made contact with the ITN after having killed one of their own. Surely this will not come back to bite him later in this installment. But for now, things are going swimmingly, all things considered. We’re more than halfway into the novel and we have yet to encounter a living Niss, that’s fine. Roan’s less concerned about the Niss and more about how he, as an embryo, made his way to the black market on Tambool, the planet of his upbringing.

When we return to Tambool we find that Roan’s adoptive mom is dead. Oh nooooo. Specifically, and this is one of the more disturbing parts of what is already a pretty grim novel, she had sold her body to be experimented on, as like a cadaver, so that she would leave Roan with a small inheritance if/when he returned home. Through some interrogation (by that I mean threatening at gunpoint) Roan is given some info, namely that he came originally from Alpha Centauri (I don’t know if you know this, but Alpha Centauri is big) and that he was the only embryo of his batch to make it to the black market intact. It’s not much to go on, but it’s something. By this point, Roan has taken a few of the best of his crew and come down like a landing party in Star Trek, leaving one of them to defend for himself once they leave (or rather escape) the black market. Roan’s best and brightest are Askor, Poion, and Sidis, although I’m gonna be honest with you, with the exception of Poion I can’t tell these fuckers apart. Poion at least has the ability to read people’s emotions on a telepathic level, so in that way (speaking of Star Trek) he’s like the Deanna Troi of the group. Also like Troi, Poion is not very useful, and likes to state the obvious.

Under the guise of being an ITN man, Roan and his three most trusted men are taken in by the fledgling navy and given what is arguably the most memorable sequence in the novel (at least up to this point), in the form of a luxurious dinner party. I’ve mentioned before that each installment has had a villain, or at least an antagonistic figure in the case of Henry Dread. For the third installment we have Commodore Quex, technically a Gook but who claims to be at least partly human. Slavery is treated as the norm by certain cultures in this novel, but the men of the ITN take things a step further by really treating their slaves as property, maiming and killing them for any reason they feel like. ITN HQ is described as a place of decadence that’s slowly rotting away. Get this:

The Headquarters of the ITN was a craggy many-towered palace built ages before by a long-dead prince of a vanished dynasty. It loomed like a colossus over the tumbled mud houses of the village. A vast green window like a cyclopean eye cast back brilliant viridian reflections as Roan and his crew marched in under the crumbling walls along a wide marble walkway, went up wide steps flanked by immaculate conical trees of dark green set among plants with tiny violet blossoms.

Roan may be very much an anti-hero, having no qualms with killing and stealing to get what he wants, but it turns out there are people who are even worse than him. He also comes from a working-class background, and spent his whole life up to now surrounded by Gooks and Geeks. The almost comical levels of racism shown by Henry Dread and later Quex and his goons alienate Roan from the ITN cause, because it’s become obvious by now that the ITN is a human supremacist organization. At one point Quex has an alien slave girl casually murdered at the dinner party for the “crime” of appearing to have annoyed Roan. So it’s hard to feel bad when Roan quite deliberately puts a bullet through Quex’s heart.

A Step Farther Out

We are slowly creeping toward the climax of this novel, which I only get a faint impression of because of how it’s structured. While these scenes and chapters sort of fall into place so as to fit in magazine installments, it’s also a quasi-episodic quest narrative whose effectiveness I’m unsure about. There is no B plot or divergence from the quest so much as Roan and his crew hopping from place to place. I will say, as a positive point, that Earthblood‘s open violence and sexuality is not something I would’ve expected from a pre-New Wave novel published in a magazine. This is a dark read, and not what I would recommend if you’re into high adventure that’s more fun-loving; but at the same time, it is worth recommending as a Heinlein pastiche that’s both less creepy and more from a humanist angle than what Heinlein (especially in the ’60s) was capable of writing.

See you next time.