The Fenris Device is fifth in the Hooded Swan series (1974) by Brian
Stableford.
Spaceman Grainger is still
shackled to the Swan and employ of its owner Charlot. He has been talked into
taking the Swan into the hell of planet Leucifer V, the world the Gallacellans
called Mormyr. It’s tricky, treacherous and his attempt fails. Plenty of
fascinating convincing techno-gobbledegook as Grainger makes the attempt, his
body and mind merged with the Swan’s controls. ‘I was really pounding the flux,
because I needed all the shields up. Leucifer was a matter-dense system and you
can’t go making tachyonic transfers in bad vacuum without a full complement of
shields. As it was, we were bound to lose power when I went transcee…’ Transcee
means going through the light barrier.
Why venture there?
Some Gallacellans want to recover a spaceship that was abandoned over a
thousand years ago.
Stableford gives us another extra-terrestrial race: ‘the
average Gallecellan is about seven feet tall, but he looks taller because he
has big ears which stick upward from his head. At least rumour has it they are
ears. After several hundred years, we still don’t know for sure. He has a face
which might be yellow or brown, sometimes striped or blotched, the texture of
wax. He has eyes in the back of his head as well as the front, he also has a
mouth in the back of his head, but somewhat modified… One is for eating, the
other is for talking. A Gallacellan usually turns his back on you to talk to
you, but if you are another Gallecellan you have your back turned as well, so
it doesn’t seem rude…’ (p19)
The current antipathy towards ‘globalisation’ has its
pre-echoes here. ‘Worlds like Pallant were the only places where they could
make a safe living now that the companies were steadily absorbing everything
exploitable.’ (p21)
And: ‘The expansion of the companies was devouring the
galaxy… War was coming. War between the companies and the law, war between the
companies and each other. War between human and alien…’ (p139)
Fenris stems from the Old Norse/Icelandic – wolf, eater of
the moon in the twilight of the gods. There’s a villain, a dwarf with a massive
chip on his shoulder, who also happens to be deranged.
Yet again Grainger is aided by ‘the wave’ ensconced in his
head, a symbiotic creature who has been around for a long time, and still has a few surprises for the host.
Grainger tells us – and all and sundry – that he is no hero.
Yet he tends to do heroic things. His endeavours to rescue friends stranded on
the inhospitable planet vouch for that in some tense imaginative writing. Why
put himself at risk? Maybe he can negotiate his freedom from his debt to
Charlot, finally...
The final book in the series is Swan Song.
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