Killer!

Our book today is the slam-bang sci-fi novel Killer by David Drake and Karl Edward Wagner. The book (an entirely successful outgrowth of an equally successful but substantially different short story by the same title) is set during the reign of the emperor Domitian and features the stoically heroic big game hunter Lycon, who has provided many an exotic beasts for the slaughter of the Roman games. Lycon has developed many contacts over the years, and the story opens when one of them shows him a weird animal found by some natives in Numidia in the rubble after a mountaintop exploded. The creature in question is man-shaped, with tough scaly blue skin and razor-sharp claws, and all the other animals in the caravan hate it instinctively.

Drake and Wagner are old hands at crafting expert sci-fi thrillers; they set to work immediately playing on the delicious narrative tension that arises from the fact that we understand right away that the creature is from another planet, whereas Lycon and his associates can't possibly think that and so spend the bulk of the novel simply to trying to comprehend how such an animal could exist in the world. The creature is cunning and at least human-smart, and it quickly escapes and begins to create havoc. Lycon pursues it with a pack of enormous dogs, and the results are sadly predictable:

Lycon was less than a hundred yards from the hedge, when the blue-scaled lizard-ape vaulted over the thorny barrier with an acrobat's grace. It writhed through the air, and one needle-clawed hand slashed out - tearing the throat from the nearest Molossian before the dog was fully aware of its presence. The lizard-ape bounced to the earth like a cat, as the last two snarling hounds sprang for it together. Spinning and slashing as it ducked under and away, the thing was literally a blur of motion. Deadly motion. Neither hound completed its leap, as lethal talons tore and gutted - slew with nightmarish precision.

Lycon skidded to a stop on the muddy field. He did not need to glance behind him to know he was alone with the beast. Its eyes glowed in the sunset as it turned from the butchered dogs and stared at its pursuer.

In the course of the pursuit that follows, Lycon gains the help of a mysterious "native" who conceals secrets just as otherworldly as those of the blue-skinned man-ape, and the hunt quickly goes from desperate to gruesome, as the hunters find an old associate hanging from the rafters of the creature's latest lair, his goo-encased body serving as an unwilling incubator:

Smiler's throat convulsed. Then his lips moved and spewed not words but blue-shimmering larvae the size of men's fingers - dozens of them, gouting up to flop onto the wood and writhe on vestigial legs toward the man who had just approached. Blood sprayed from Smiler's lips and throat together as the entire substance of his body seemed to convulse and give way to pass more of the things that had just hatched within his living flesh.

Killer takes the premises of Alien and Predator, shakes them vigorously, and transports them two thousand years into the past. The pace of the action never slows down for a moment, and the neat little trick the authors (both of whom are lifelong unapologetic advocates of the neat little trick) pull off at the very end will have you smiling for days. David Drake went on from Killer to overwrite severely - he's still a first-rate craftsman, but the best thing he could possibly do for that craft would be to summarily kill off every single character in all of his ongoing series, take a solid year off from all writing of any kind, then take a solid year to write - really write - one self-contained novel that will have no sequels. It would sweep the sci-fi awards if he did, you mark my words.

And if Killer prompts even a few of you to hunt around and explore the gritty, dark fictional worlds of Karl Edward Wagner, so much the better. A fat new collection of his work - with a fittingly badass new cover illustration - would be a fine thing indeed. Fortunately, in the meantime, we have this novel - in which both of them are clearly having a whale of a time.

Procurator!

Our books today are the three in Kirk Mitchell's "Procurator" series, based in an alternate history of his own devising, one in which Pontius Pilate listened to the cautions of his wife and spared the life of Jesus Christ, thereby assuring the Empire two thousand years more of life. The series started in 1984 with Procurator, continued in 1986 with New Barbarians, and petered out in 1989 with Cry Republic, and the three books star Germanicus Agricola, who gradually rises from the procutatorship of the first book to the height of power in this unfallen Rome. Germanicus is an old-fashioned stand-up hero, an action-ready military man with a nimble brain and a Jim Kirk sense of humor.

Mitchell teams Germanicus with a trusty German aide and a series of interesting women who serve as love interests, and Mitchell enjoys a great David Drake-style ability to write action well, to keep his plots (Germanicus against the Muslims, Germanicus against the Aztecs, Germanicus against the Japanese, with lots of internecine machinations thrown in along the way) constantly bubbling.

The central idea is a bit odd - but then, all 'what if Rome didn't fall' central plot ideas are a bit odd, since they usually misunderstand the causes of that fabled event rather fundamentally, as Mitchell (I'm guessing wilfully, since his straight-up Roman historical novel A.D. Anno Domini, in addition to being really good, shows that he knows his Roman history quite well) does here. With all due respect to Gibbon, Christianity didn't bring about the downfall of the Empire, as Mitchell's Pontius Pilate scenario implies - slavery did the deed, as it would certainly have done for the British Empire and 19th century America, if those countries hadn't learned (with differing degrees of reluctance) from the Roman example.

But that's not important, as Mitchell must know perfectly: he barely touches on this central conceit before bolting onward to his slam-bang stories. These books are enormously enjoyable page-turners full of great plot developments, great characters, and, sprinkled here and there, some great insights into the actual Roman experience, as when Germanicus and his lady-love Colonel Crispa are eating an improvised meal in an abandoned room:

She slowly nodded, eyes glistening, then let her gaze drift over the food on the table. "This is what it is to be Roman, isn't it?"

"What do you mean?"

"Always sitting down to someone else's table."

"Yes," he said simply. He had long since stopped trying to deceive himself.

In New Barbarians, Germanicus gets drawn into a war between Rome and the Aztec Empire, and at the climax of that book he finds himself burdened with more authority than any man has carried in long centuries. Mithchell is practiced enough to know the moment is right for a bit of comic relief:

"Now that the war is done," he [Germanicus] said in a tired but firm voice from his curule chair, "it is time to rebuild and reshape ..."

Suddenly, in the space that separated Germanicus from the assembly, a jaguar padded across the floor. This greatly alarmed the Anasazi headsmen for, as Germanicus later learned, they were convinced the animal was Tizoc's ghost. It halted, glared at Germanicus, who steeled himself to betray no fright, and then continued on its way out of the lord general's feasting chamber.

"One of our first orders of business," Germanicus broke the unpleasant calm, "will be to repair the walls of the royal menagerie."

There was tentative, then boisterous, laughter.

But probably the best moment in the whole series (I guess we have to call it a trilogy, since it's unlikely Mitchell will be returning to it, although he should - in the twenty years since he wrote these books, the whole sub-genre of alternate histories has blossomed beyond imagining) comes toward the end of the third book, Cry Republic, when Tora, a character from the other side of Rome's world, measures his distance from the city of Germanicus by how distant the echoes become:

The garrulous Bithynian sailors who had conveyed him across the Pontus Euxinus to the principality of Colchus repeated all the latest rumors about Antonius Nepos, Claudia Nero, and the "most likely rotting" Germanicus Agricola. But the taciturn muleteers who conducted him over the towering Caucasus Mountains seemed remarkably unaware of the turmoil in the empire on which they bordered, and one of them spoke for the first time in two days to ask: "Who be this Autun Neppo you revile?" To avoid any Roman agents in Parthia, Tora crossed the Hyrcanian Sea on a barge loaded to the gunwales with tin ore, and when he landed on that citiless shore claimed by no country, he no longer heard the word Rome in any variation. A week farther to the east, a holy man, who claimed to be the most widely traveled member of his impoverished tribe, admitted that he had never heard of Rome, but he was familiar with "the Empire of the Eagle," having met a ten-foot-tall stranger from that land. The caravanners Tora joined soon after were aware of the "Men of the Eagle" but had never heard of an empire by that name. However, these squat, sepia-complected men with slightly-tapered eyes had been well briefed about the latest happenings in the Serican Empire. They had even referred to it by its proper name: the Xing Dynasty.

At that moment, while lurching atop a musty-breathed camel with his and the beast's combined shadows stretching out across the late afternoon sands, Tora realized that he had turned the corner of the world.

And now on a breathlessly hot morning, departing on the back of a pony from the sprawling and fly-ridden mud city on the Xing frontier, he smiled at what the women of the shining black braids and joined eyebrows had told him: They had never heard of the Men of the Eagle, but they knew of beasts half-eagle and half-human who resided in the same nest the sun used at night. These beasts were called Rumahn.

These books are fantastic fun reading, but they're frustrating too - not only because they're all out of print (needed you to even ask?) but because they automatically get you dreaming about other novels in the series - Germanicus against those Xing, for instance, or Germanicus - and his allies, one imagines - against an alien invasion of Earth, etc. In lieu of those never-to-be-written subsequent volumes, I'd settle for one gorgeously-produced fat trade paperback collecting these three volumes, maybe with a new introduction by Mitchell, if he's still willing and able. I'd buy it.