[.ca] Black on Black (ISBN 0671577883)

Traditional Science Fiction:
Although traditional science fiction isn't my usual cup of tea, I found BLACK ON BLACK to be a very good read. The world is real enough to almost leave grit in your teeth and the characters, most of them alien, come alive, with complexities one wouldn't expect from most writers. I'm looking forward to reading her next book, STARS OVER STARS, and future books.

The Lost-Male Returns:
Black on Black is the first novel in the Hrinn series. Heyoka Blackeagle is a hrinn who was stolen from his people as a cubling. Rescued from the slavers by a old trader, Ben Blackeagle, Heyoka has been raised among the Oglala Lakota. Now he is a Confederate Ranger and is spending a leave on Anktan searching for his hrinnti roots. Unfortunately, his partner, Mitsu Jensen, insists on joining him. In this novel, Heyoka approaches the hrinnti near the base, is disparaged as one of the Dead smelling Outsiders, yet is invited to the males' house for more talk. Mitsu ignores his efforts to go alone, follows behind him, and is caught by the hrinnti. Heyoka has just learned that he comes from the Levv Line, but rushes out of the males' house when he hears the sounds of Mitsu fighting her captor. Although he tries to hurry through the crowd, he is slowed and slashed by some of the males and she is gone by the time he gets there. Heyoka returns to the base to start a search for Mitsu, but the Director of the Research Station, Eeal Eldrich, refuses to let any of his people join the search. Moreover, the station doctor sedates him while tending his wounds. When he awakes the following morning, the trail is long cold, but he goes out anyway. As he attempts to enter the Line Hold where Mitsu is being held, the males catch up to him and escort him down into their meeting house. There he is accused of being a fake manufactured by the Outsiders and is challenged to a duel. The leader of the house, Nisk, intercedes, declares that he is sponsoring Heyoka, and takes the challenge for him. When Nisk loses, both he and Heyoka have to leave the area by sundown. Something is going on that involves the research station and some of the Line leaders, something that resulted in the destruction of the Levv Line almost thirty years ago. To the hrinnti, a new and awesome pattern/in/progress is forming, centered on the black-on-black male, Heyoka. Some of the hrinnti are trying to kill him and others are protecting him. Meanwhile, someone is using off-world weapons to kill hrinnti. The author obviously knows something about the American Plains Indians and other Indian tribes, for some the hrinnti culture and environment seems to derive from these people. However, the hrinnti society also has some similarity to the pack behavior of wolves. All in all, the author has created a believable sentient, but predatory, species and culture. The author does have some problems with human military ranks and terminology, but seems to have corrected these deficiencies in the sequel. However, the author does comprehend some aspects of human military thinking and the depiction of both the hrinnti and the flek aliens shows a rare talent in speculative xenopsychology. Recommended for Wentworth fans and anyone else who enjoys reading about exotic cultures in a science fiction setting.

Space Opera With A Difference:
BLACK ON BLACK is a nicely realized space opera with a difference. In the ordinary way, we have humans (and allies?) at war against a nasty alien species (the flek) that takes planets and alters the environment, obliterating the native species in the process and exploiting the resources for their own purposes. The planet Anktan, inhabited by the hrinn, has been a backwater in this war. It has a small human outpost, but the hrinn are a low-tech species that don't travel off-planet. When Sgt. Blackeagle, a hrinn who has spent almost his entire life in human society, returns to Anktan looking for his heritage, he finds himself a stranger among his own kind. He also finds that Anktan has become a pawn in the human-flek war. The difference in BLACK ON BLACK is that the humans and flek play a secondary role in the story. The book is primarily about Blackeagle and the hrinn, and is told mostly from their point of view. Telling a story convincingly from an alien point of view is a trick that's not easy to pull off, but Wentworth does a nice job of it here. She makes Blackeagle, with all of his doubts and confusion, and the native hrinn, with their alien customs and habits, seem both believable and sympathetic. BLACK ON BLACK is a notch above ordinary space opera. Wentworth tells her story from an unusual point of view and tells it well. I'm looking forward to the sequel. If you like science fiction, I think you'll enjoy this. I did.

Human/versus/Other:
Rarely are new alien species created with so much "backstory" so clearly delineated. In Black on Black, K. D. Wentworth brings us not one, but two new aliens: the Hrinn, and the Flek. Astutely camoflaged as an action-adventure space opera, Black on Black is really a meditation and a fugue on the concept of "other." Heyoka, who is neither human nor Hrinn, faces a lifetime of otherness. Raised by a consummate human outsider, a Sioux warrior, he tries to camoflage his otherness by joining the military...yet somehow, the fact that he is about 7 feet tall, with fangs and claws, and huge sharp teeth, and very black fur covering his entire body somehow keeps interfering with his desire to be considered fully human. His journey of discovery to find his roots as Hrinn get him into more trouble than it is worth, yet somehow he manages to float through it without getting too involved....until, that is, his human partner, Mitsu, turns up missing and is found to be a brainwashed slave of the Flek...Hrinn versus Flek...two complete opposites as alien species. The Flek, a hive species while the Hrinn are so individualistic they can hardly live with each other, let alone humans and Flek. Heyoka is very well realized, and stops way short of becoming the invincible star-guided hero that most bad space opera provides. He is a seven-foot-tall bag of insecurities and wants/needs/desires just like the rest of the universe. Wentworth craftily disguises this metaphysical tractatus as a rip-roaring space opera, with plenty of action to disguise the thought pill.

An Auspicious Debut for a Series:
One of my favorite subdivisions of the vast sf field is what I call the "culture-dependent" story--one that takes place on an alien world and turns upon the differences between its native race and humanity. It's not an easy type to write convincingly, because a human author naturally tends to think like a human, and up to now there are only two--C. J. Cherryh and Poul Anderson--whom I've found really capable of getting into an alien's skin and viewing the Universe through its eyes (and sometimes other senses). With "Black on Black," new author Wentworth, like Superman clearing a tall building, joins this auspicious company in a single bound. Ranger Sgt. Heyoka Blackeagle, his name to the contrary, is not an Oglala Sioux (though he was reared by one), but a hrinn--a lupine type of nonhuman, seven feet tall, with an all-over coat of black fur, two thumbs on each hand, and retractible claws on every digit. Invalided out of the Service after sustaining a leg wound in the ongoing war against the insectoid flek, he makes up his mind to visit his homeworld, Anktan, for the first time in his conscious memory (his foster father rescued him from a slave pen when he was little more than an infant), and try to find his roots. His human partner, Cpl. Mitsu Jensen, is due a leave and goes with him. His initial contact with other hrinnti is both confusing and dismaying: they take him for an "Outsider" and "one of the Dead" (their name for anyone with an alien smell), yet at least some of them seem to attach great importance to his coloring--solid black outer- and undercoats, with not a speck of other hue (hence the title of the book). Gradually he discovers that he may be the last survivor of the Levv, a Line that was destroyed by an alliance of hrinnti for supposed infractions of the species' social code at about the time of his birth; that his coming has been the subject of prophecy--and that something very peculiar is going on at the local Confederation base. When Mitsu is captured by one of the hrinn Lines, then mysteriously vanishes after supposedly being returned to her own kind, it's up to Heyoka to weld the quarrelsome Lines--dominated by females--and the males' houses into a single force that can somehow prevent the flek from completing the transport grid they've been secretly constructing in the back country for over 30 years. If he fails, his people will be destroyed, their world remade to suit flek ideas of perfection, and the enemy will have a staging area from which to strike at dozens of nearby planets. For all his alienness, Heyoka is a sympathetic character whose feelings of rootlessness in a human culture and struggle to repress "the other who lives inside him" echo the frequent literary theme of alienation. And the hrinnti, though hardly the most sympathetic nonhuman race in sf--with their savage quarrelsomeness and lack of any concept of friendship or family--are fascinating in their gradually revealed history, their fixation on what they call "patterns," and their image of the godhead, which they call "the Voice." Wentworth slips readily from human to hrinnti viewpoint, and when reading chapters written in the latter, it's easy to forget that this is a fictional people invented by a human. What resolves the story is the ability of some hrinnti, Heyoka among them, to "use power"-- somehow storing and channelling a kind of cosmic electricity through their own cells: a concept that is, to the best of my knowlege, completely new to the genre. If you enjoy adventures on distant worlds and like to meet new species, "Black on Black" is your kind of book.