We all crave power. Its promise of mastery and conquest, new frontiers and new horizons, is a seductive song that we are ill-equipped to resist. For who would not wish to command all that he surveys? Who would not desire to rise above his fellows, singled out as a chief among men? To be greater is to be heeded and respected, flattered and obeyed, while to be lesser is to be ignored, lost in a sea of anonymity.
But power also has its costs. For not only does it entice the wielder to capture more of it, regardless of the price to his soul, his ethics, it distances him from his more ordinary fellows. It places him on a lonely pedestal from which he looks down upon the world. It would not take long for a man at such a remove to turn coldly calculating, having lost any means of sustaining his empathy, his compassion. So how can the powerful remain human? How can they hold onto their warmth and their morality? Ms. Czerneda speculates in her futuristic epic.
In the distant future, humanity has long since spread from Earth to join a galactic community of numerous alien races known as the Trade Pact. Spread across dozens of worlds, this concordia of races, founded on principles of non-interference, by and large permits its member races to act as they see fit, compelling them only to maintain spaceports on their homeworlds, through which trade can flow, and to permit the Trade Pact to enforce galactic law both in these spaceports and along all the many links in the chain of commerce.
Interwoven into the DNA of the Trade Pact are the Clan, a mysterious strain of humanoids who have the power to tap into a hyperdimensional void, a metaphysical conduit through which they can both instantaneously travel and communicate. The Clan believe that they created the M'hir, that the talent to manipulate it manifested in but a fraction of their population, and that it was this fundamental difference that lead to Stratification, a process by which the talented among the Clan left their homeworld, abandoning their untalented brothers to their pathetically ordinary lives. Considering that they are but a thousand amongst billions, that to expose themselves and the full extent of their powers would be suicidal, the Clan take to the shadows, manipulating interstellar events with quiet and deadly grace.
In A Thousand Word For Stranger, the trilogy's opening volume, we meet Sira, a frightened and bewildered Clanswoman who, seemingly thanks to a violent assault on a Trade Pact world, is suffering the debilitating effects of amnesia. Her mind is an empty void save for a strange compulsion to seek out the human captain of a cargo ship capable of delivering her from the cold and miserable world upon which she's been stranded. Hiring on as a hindmost crewman, Sira slowly begins to recover her memories, but not in time to figure out why the Clan and enforcers from the Trade Pact are madly chasing after her, seeking to recover her from the troubled clutches of Jason Morgan, the alternately dangerous and charming spacer to whom Sira has hitched her wagon.
As events unfold and Sira staggers from danger to danger, captor to captor, she begins to realize a terrifying truth, that the future of her race depends upon her and that a renegade Clansman is perfectly willing to hijack her destiny, using her as a means of exponentially increasing his own power. Will Sira remember enough of who she was to thwart the designs of a madman set on galactic conquest? For if she fails, her mind will be sundered, her body and her talent left to the whimsey of the certifiable.
In Tides of Power, the trilogy's second instalment, the Clan's dirty laundry is further dragged into the light when the full extent of the genetic trap into which they've bound themselves becomes clear. The long-lived Clan must unlock their reproductive powers by Joining with a member of their race of similar talent to their own. A mismatched joining, that is one in which one member of the potential couple is of a significantly different talent level than the other, often leads to both man and woman being sucked into the M'hir, their essences forever scattered across an unimaginable voidscape. For a race who numbered even a million, this would not be a problem. Outliers a the top and the bottom of the talent scale would simply die off without being able to find a match while everyone else in the middle matched, reproduced and sustained the population. But with their numbers now vanishingly small, the Clan faces extinction thanks to the foolishness of their leaders who keep trying to breed stronger and stronger pairings. This policy has only served to produce an increasing number of incompatible pairings which only worsens their population problem.
A faction within the Clan has fixed upon a foul solution to this problem. They will harvest the reproductive organs of their most powerful and use the science of the lab to sustain their population. But when their schemes are uncovered by the vengeful captain Morgan, through connections with his tortured past, they will have to be exceedingly careful. For is he is permitted to unleash his obliterating rage upon them, they will have wished the M'hir had taken them.
In To Trade The Stars, the trilogy's concluding work, the Clan is rocked by yet another scandal when its most powerful member is enlisted, against her will, in a misguided attempt to repair a wrong in the M'hir where a generational dispute between conflicting alien races has lead to a world being cut off from the pathways that the Clan tread through the M'hir. While her friends race to save the Clanswoman from danger, the fate of a entire world hangs in the balance, harboring a secret that will surely force everyone, Clan included, to re-imagine the universe that shelters them.
Though Ms. Czerneda never quite realizes the full promise of her premise, and though the trilogy, at times, succumbs to the dark side of romantic melodrama, The Trade Pact is an entertaining romp across the landscape of what we might called the standard model of science fiction. Drawing on the robotic, comedic and moralistic tropes of Star Trek, the author lays down a framework exceedingly familiar to even the mildest fans of SF. However, this unchallenging foundation takes a promising turn when Ms. Czerneda builds in the complexity of the Clan, a race of highly political creatures through which she can explore the nature of power and the extent to which it can lead even the most intelligent into a wasteland of immorality and treacherousness. Their arrogance, their presumptuousness and their desire for quiet but pervasive dominance leads them to not only accelerate the pace of their own extinction, but willfully ignore the myriad signs suggesting that they are far from the all-conquering beings they purport to be. Such delusions serves the story well while providing us a classic example of abuse of power.
The work's other major theme is identity. Who are we? Are we the gestalt of our memories which are in turn merely records of our experiences? Or are we more than this, the fundamentals of our personalities hardwired into us by biochemistry and neurology? The former is arguably the more optimistic view. It suggests that we can change who we are by merely reprogramming, or re-conditioning, our memories, altering them by building new memories upon them. This process of gradual sedimentation might well lead to positive changes in who we are. The latter view, however, offers encouragement to those who have lost memories. For though we might no longer have the records of our experiences, we know that we can eventually arrive back at roughly where we were, lead there by a consistency of behavior that sees us make the same choices the second time round as we did the first. Both identity and power help buffer the reader against the worse excesses of ms. Czerneda's bodice-ripper romanticism.
Beyond the themes and the tropes, the technology and the romance, Ms. Czerneda has crafted an intriguing roster of characters to populate her epic. The Clan allow her to indulge in penning some truly monstrous beings who give no heed to the feelings of others, so consumed are they in fulfilling their own desires and aims. Moreover, this spectacularly egotistical backdrop serves as an excellent means of contrasting the behaviors of the trilogy's heroes, most of whom, in one way or another, are in the process of learning how to treat their fellow intelligent beings with decency and respect. The gradual development of these individuals must be considered the author's greatest achievement, for her subtlety here allows us to think of her heroes as living creatures, capable of elevating themselves beyond their ingrained prejudices.
Ultimately, though, The Trade Pact Trilogy is derivative fare. It is more than ample sustenance for a reader seeking a pleasant diversion, but there's nothing innovative here, nothing grand, nothing that compels us to stretch our imaginations or our moralities. In this way, it is a pale shadow next to the brilliance of the genre's leading minds, past and present. Ms. Czerneda simply holds too closely to the rescue fantasies of princesses, trucks too much with the thoroughly abused notion of the close call, to have her work considered more than middling.
Entertaining but nothing more... (3/5 Stars)
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