The Webs of Varok (The Archives of Varok Book 2)
His name is Conn, and he's a natural loner, enabling him to live and function within the confines of spaceships and other isolated environments. At the outset of A Place Beyond Man , he is stationed on the Elll-Varok Observation Base located on Earth's moon—which, again, hasn't yet been picked up by humans—though he lives most of the time among the contingent of similarly disposed ellls on Varok. As a side note, it's significant that Neeper limits the story's setting to our solar system. This allows her to forego such fanciful sci-fi devices as faster-than-light travel and multiple-generation starships, which become necessary when dealing with vast galactic distances.
The Webs of Varok
Our first human character is a microbiologist from Earth named Tandra Grey. Conn journeys to Earth and recruits her to be the lunar base's resident expert on inter-humanoid immunization. He introduces himself during a costume party to which he wears a clunky space suit that obscures his alien appearance. She's at once stunned, exhilarated and terrified, but ultimately it is the plucky scientist in her that prevails.
In short order, she moves herself and her daughter, Shawne, to the moon station where they become the first extraterrestrial transplants in human history. From here, the story follows two parallel themes. The first one is Tandra's personal growth as she comes to understand the aliens' ways, abandons her ties to Earth and ultimately becomes part of a multi-species family. This family consists of Tandra, her daughter, Conn and a varok named Orram, with whom Tandra shares the varokian mind-link. The other major theme is the seeming futility of convincing humans at large to choose a wiser path.
Appeals to stewardship and altruism are lost on the human public and its leadership, ruled out of hand because they go against the imperative of economic growth. As Tandra succinctly puts it, "man's conscience is made of money.
And what a worthy revival it is, in both its continued timeliness and its intelligent, believable rendering of alien values and cultures. Its sequel, The Webs of Varok , was a long time in coming, but it's finally here waiting to be discovered by a new generation. And I'm happy to report that the year lapse between offerings has not dimmed Neeper's storytelling ability nor dampened her ambition: Set on Varok shortly after the events of the first book, it takes a break from the human drama unfolding on Earth and focuses instead on a homegrown threat.
This new threat takes the form of a rapacious varokian businesswoman who intends to become rich and powerful by emulating humans' disregard for the future and the lives of other creatures. She has a new product that she insists will save vast amounts of energy by eliminating the need to heat buildings and homes. It is a type of garment known as a warming cloth, which derives its warming ability from the rare earth element rhenium.
Nov 22, Erin M.
THE WEBS OF VAROK
The peaceful status quo begins to unravel all over the planet. As Mahntik exploits the fear and greed of those around her, the naturally-trustful varoks who are mind-readers struggle to find any evidence of her wrong-doing, for Mahntik has an unheard of ability to block her mind from being fully read. Perhaps she and her alien family members are too different, and the answers she hoped to find on Varok aren't there after all. This idea of a Steady State, which is basically a philosophy of sustainable economic growth and environmental usage, is one of the strongest themes of the book and is essential to the plot.
Knowing this, I was on high-alert for any signs of didacticism, for I am rarely in the mood to be preached at, and almost never while I'm reading for pleasure. As I read, I was frankly impressed by Neeper's ability to walk that razor-fine edge between story and Steady State treatise. Every time I started to feel my eyes glaze over a little bit, Neeper would pull me back in with story and with character. Some might disagree with me on this. As for me, I feel like I learned something, and I had a good time doing it.
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They cannot explain away wonky physics with simple magic. Not that there is anything wrong with magic. I am an avid fan of fantasy. Lower your pitchforks, everyone. It must have taken Ms. Neeper an enormous and exhausting amount of research to create a believable world within our own solar system, and at a distance from the sun that would seem, even to the most unscientific of minds, antithetical to light and life. But she did it. What set this book apart for me, however--what took it from Really Good to Great--is personified in the amphibious character named Conn.
As a character, he kept the story from the dangerous buzz-killing precipice of taking itself too seriously. His voice was the strongest, his story the most compelling to me. As one character in the movie Contact says, "It would be an awful waste of space. The cover was strange and the subject matter seemed unapproachable, almost as if it were an abstruse manifesto thinly disguised as a novel.
I decided to give it a shot anyway, and discovered that my first impression could not have been more wrong. A great book is one that can surprise me into learning something, or remind me of some truth I instinctually know, while still entertaining me. The Webs of Varok did both. Read this review and others at A Writer Reads Jan 21, Denzil Pugh rated it really liked it. I abhor reading fantasy just for fantasies' sake. Why escape to another world when you return to the same world as the same person? I like to have meaning in my books, something with meat on it, that I can rip away and take with me.
Certainly, there will be a few times when Anne McCaffrey's books will call to me, something light, but usually, I want something more along the lines of Orson Scott Card, where larger moral issues are addressed. In fact, when I read and review books, especially of the sci-fi variety, my question always is, "How would OSC write this?
What surprised me was that this wasn't the first book in this series, but the second.
However, it's not completely necessary to read the other book to understand what's going on. The prologue does an ample job of getting everything set. Further, the forward tells us that what Neeper is trying to do is to create a society with a self-sustaining environment, incorporating population control, a regulatory business trade, and a Utopian system of government based on the idea that citizens are content to live their lives within the confines of regulations in order to prevent the previous cataclysms where ecological and economical systems spiraled out of control.
In fact, the book is more about this idea than anything else, leading one to believe that the plot means nothing and that it's going to be the author preaching at us the whole time. This is very far from being true. In fact, Neeper does an amazing job creating all of the sentient beings on Jupiter's hidden moon. Ellls are aquatic beings who survive on land using clothing that remains wet. They are sensuous beings, outgoing and social. The Varoks, for whom the moon is named, were the main sentient beings until whatever cataclysm befell upon them a biological war, as it turns out , ripping apart their sense of touch.
They have relied upon their development of mental communication, reading each other's minds. In fact, this is the main crux of the novel, that Varoks cannot lie to each other. This keeps the world in check, for no one is able to do anything illegal without being caught. Thus the world can operate completely differently than Earth. The downside of this is that Neeper as the characters in the book would recommend using the same regulations of Varok here on Earth, in present day society.
This, of course, is impossible, because human nature will not acquiesce to total regulation by a government. It was tried before, called Communism, and it didn't work, for precisely that reason.
- Cine con historia (eBook-ePub) (GP Actualidad) (Spanish Edition)!
- Paradox: Traveler (Time Paradox Series Book 1).
- Mikrogeschichte in der Ethnologie: Ein wertvoller Beitrag (German Edition)!
I remember walking through the park here in Conyers, and trying to come up with a society that could live in harmony with the beauty that I was seeing around me. And having read Ayn Rand and being against governmental control of the individual, I tried to overcome the weaknesses of Rand's world and our own. The only way I could do it was with population control and economic controls that would forbid companies from making forced obsolescence a part of the economic system see my blog on the forever light bulb coming from Clifford D.
Simak's book Ring Around the Sun. In fact, when I stopped thinking about it that day, I had come up with a society very similar to Neeper's Varok, but with the large problem of making people honest with themselves and others. Only a biological or technological breakthrough would accomplish this.
It might be that something distracted me at the sentence where Orram's disappearance happened, or something. It's not always the book's fault, but I can't reconcile it. I do recommend the book, even to conservatives who would find reading a book written with liberal ideas repulsive. You'll even agree with most of the ideas in the book. They are ideals that conservatives and liberals must strive for and the goals are usually the same, just arrived at in two totally different ways. I have the first book 75 version, and will get the '11 version, too, and see what differences there are.
The Webs of Varok - What's New - The Archives of Varok
It looks like the '75 book deals with the differences between the three species, especially those of social and sensual nature. I hope that these books are done as well as this book.
My varok nodded and smiled, raising his chiseled brow without looking up from the navigation panel. The vision faded, but the painting was mine now, a part of me Continue reading in The Webs of Varok sneak preview: Jump to footer widgets. The Books , II. The Webs of Varok. The Archives of Varok I.