Hunted (Gardner novel)

Backstory

As part of the "League of Peoples" series, Hunted exploits the same conceptual framework as the earlier books. By the middle of the 25th century, an advanced human society calling itself the Technocracy, based on a terraformed New Earth, will be part of an interstellar social order called the League of Peoples. As part of the League, humanity will benefit from many advanced technologies, interstellar space flight being only the most obvious. The price for belonging to this galactic order is relatively mild: all societies in the League must renounce fatal violence against other sentient beings. Violation of this simple cardinal rule means that the guilty individual, or society, is no longer eligible for interstellar travel—the mere attempt brings instant death from the highly advanced species (far beyond the human level) who run the League. In Hunted, for the first time in the series, humans fall foul of the League's guiding principle; in the opening scene, the entire crew of a spaceship is instantly and mysteriously executed when they enter interstellar space.

(The paperback edition of the novel contains a short afterword by Gardner, in which he makes some observations about the assumptions behind his series. In his fictional future, humans are not "important"...but neither are they, or we, "downtrodden slaves of bug-eyed monsters...." In a galaxy of many intelligent species, those who are "billions of years" in advance of humanity have no desire to rule us, just as "we humans don't want to govern earthworms...." Gardner's strategy allows him to escape clichés about conquerors and the conquered, to tell original stories.)

The other key elements of Gardner's fictional future universe—the Outward Fleet of the Technocracy and its Explorers Corps, and a growing assemblage of advanced alien species, cleverly imagined and described—are naturally included.

Hunted also adds depth and perspective to one other element of Grander's grand scheme. The human species of the future is deeply corrupt and degenerate: "...the Technocracy is so pathetically weak, I sometimes want to puke. We're lazy and venal, like Imperial Rome at its most decadent..." The book sets up these and other themes and concepts for the next novel in the series, Ascending (2001).

Plot summary

At the opening of the story, Explorer Edward York (son of one of the High Council's most ruthless Admirals) is freshly arrived on board an Outward Fleet spaceship, the Willow, which is leaving the Troyen solar system where he has been stationed for the past twenty years. The atmosphere aboard ship is febrile; the shy and retiring York is roped into attending a party, a masquerade-cum-orgy, by a woman in an Admiral's uniform with a large port-wine birthmark on her cheek. (Readers of the previous novels will recognize the recurring character of Festina Ramos.) The reason for the crew's semi-hysterical state quickly becomes clear: the crew has violated the League's single basic rule, and suddenly everyone aboard ship, except for York, drops dead, cryptically executed by the high authorities of the League of Peoples.

Alone aboard the ship, York, who by his own testimony suffers from at least mild mental retardation (he's not a genuine Explorer, but merely an Admiral's black-sheep son who's been shunted into the Corps), begins to unravel an increasing complex plot. In the ship's hold, he discovers, dead like everyone else, a queen of the Mandasar species that has spent the past two decades consumed in a violent civil war. The Mandasars are the key alien species and society in the novel: they resemble giant lobsters, with eight legs, pairs of claws and arms, with whiskered faces and brain humps on their backs. Their species comes in four castes or orders, varying in size and color, from small brown females called "gentles," through workers and warriors, up to the hive-queens, who are four meters long, saffron yellow, with four claws instead of two and bright green venom sacs. Their social order is something of a cross between an ant farm or beehive, and feudal Japan.

What is a dead hive queen doing on a ship of the Outward Fleet? And what did the crew do to earn themselves an infallibly just death sentence from the League of Peoples? As York tries to plumb deep waters of conspiracy and corruption, he meets the real Admiral Festina Ramos, and realizes that the woman aboard the Willow was costumed as the Admiral for the masquerade party. He also falls in with genuine Explorers, and ends up on a desperate expedition back to Troyen, the Mandasars' home world, in an attempt to unravel an Admiral's corrupt scheme and stop a civil war. In the process, York learns the real meaning of his status as his father's genetically-engineered clone; he learns too that his beloved twin-sister-clone, whom he saw dead twenty years before, is still alive, but not the person he thought he knew; and he discovers the nature of the double within himself that sometimes takes over his mind and body.

The story expands to include a formidable nanotechnology, a sentient and telepathic moss that can overwhelm a human being, and members of a mysterious species who are never seen outside their personal robot craft. The ending manages to tie up all the loose ends, as well as provide anticipations of further stories to come.