A Princess of the Aerie (Mass Market Paperback)

In this latest outing, Jak and his good pal Dujuv get shanghaied, more or less, by an erstwhile friend of theirs and end up dropping in on Mercury to bust up an evil cartel. The requisite amount of sex, kung fu fighting, and intrigue follows.

This is an okay series. It's set about 1500 years or so in the future and has a bit of a hard science edge. (Folks aren't whipping throughout the galaxy on hyperspace drives, and humanity still hasn't clawed its way out of the solar system, or at least not on a regular basis.) We now have alien neighbors camped out on Pluto as a result of a nasty interstellar war in which the Rubahy shipped into the outer reaches of our neighborhood and started bombarding the inner planets with small rocks going along at a hefty percentage of lightspeed. This went on for fifty years or so, until we finally punted a doomsday device into their nearby system and whipped their sun into a nova. Whereupon the previously hidden Galactics descended upon both sides and rebuked everyone jointly for genocide. They'll reach a decision in a coupla hundred years on which race to exterminate.

In the meantime, life goes on, and between the settled inner planets and the two major orbital clusters, the Hive and the Aerie, there are enough competing interests to provide for continual jockeying for position, although the people of Jak's time abide by the Wager and Nakasen's Principles, and these keep them from nuking each other in fits of pique. (The odd assassination or "accident" here and there is acceptable.)

Fairly good stuff, although in some respects Jak is more of a bystander in this book and Duj gets the bulk of the character development. The third installment is already out and features much greater growth on Jak's part. So far, this series is a weird balance of action, post-modern heroics, libertarian musings, crypto-cabals, and amoral politics. It bears watching.

While all three of these semi-comic space operas are enjoyable, Barnes really hits his stride with the third novel. But the first two, albeit not Barnes' best, are very enjoyable, and I would recommend reading them in order.

No, I won't summarize the story here; other reviewers have already done that at least as well as I could, probably better, so why be redundant?

It will leave you breathless and wishing you lived for another 2000 years!