Last Friday, I unexpectedly had the afternoon off because of the blackout (we had power, but state workers were sent home to conserve power to help bring NYC back up). The obvious thing to do was to stretch out in the backyard with a book, but I was curiously reluctant to read the book I was nearly done with (The Merlin Conspiracy), probably because I was nearly done with it and wanted something to immerse myself in all afternoon. For no apparent reason, I picked up Wen Spencer’s near-future SF Alien Taste; after I finished it, I went out and bought the two sequels, Tainted Trail and Bitter Waters.
I bought Alien Taste because of, oddly, Steven Brust’s Paths of the Dead; I posted my book log review to Usenet, where someone picked up on the “Alternatively, he may just have a mouse in his pocket.” quote and mentioned the series favorably. Spencer was a guest at Boskone; I didn’t see any of the panels she was on, but her name in the program reminded me to pick up Alien Taste in the dealer’s room.
Ukiah Oregon was found as a feral child living with a wolf pack, near the town he was named after. As Alien Taste opens, he’s working as a tracker in partnership with a private detective; the current quarry is a missing woman whose roommates have been slaughtered by someone with a katana. Given the title of the book, it’s no surprise to the reader that his tracking abilities (which include tracking by DNA) are, yes, inhumanly good. Ukiah doesn’t know this yet, though, and most of Alien Taste is taken up with Ukiah discovering his origins and how they are tied into the central worldbuilding idea of the series. Over the series, the consequences and the backstory of this idea keep expanding in satisfactorily complicated ways; it’s nowhere near Lord of the Rings level of complexity, but approaches, oh, say, Daniel Keys Moran’s published Continuing Time books (Emerald Eyes, The Long Run, The Last Dancer).
[ Aside: these are set in 2004; the first was published in July 2001. I was initially worried by the back cover copy of the third, which mentions Homeland Security: my reaction was, “Hey, we’ve already posited gay marriage and female-on-female in vitro fertilization as happening sometime around 1999; just accept that we’re in an alternative universe and don’t try to shoehorn in current events.” Fortunately, this turns out not to be a real problem, though I’m still not sure why it was necessary to bring Homeland Security into it. ]
Obviously, I really enjoyed Alien Taste, since I immediately went to Borders and bought the rest of the series. They’re certainly not perfect books: the prose, while reasonably transparent to me, is nothing remarkable, and many of the interpersonal elements lack subtlety (for instance, if you can’t spot the love interests the instant they come on stage, you’ve been, well, raised by wolves). But I liked the cast of characters immediately, a reaction that I find hard to explain in any useful way, and care about how the emotional stuff plays out, unsubtle though it is. The mystery and tracking-methodology elements are also appealing, and feed into the fun, fast, and exciting plots. And I like the way the central idea is being worked out; it’s a rich universe.
The first two are self-contained, though I wouldn’t read them out of order. The third ends on more of a cliffhanger; the fourth will be out in May 2004. I don’t know if more are planned, but I’ll be reading the fourth, as well as Spencer’s forthcoming non-series books.
(Oh, and the relevance of the mouse in the pocket? That would be a spoiler, but the author’s website currently has a teaser quote featuring a mouse . . . [If you want to avoid hints, though, I’d avoid the sample chapters from the sequels.] Edit: said teaser quote is no longer there. Sorry.)