The Quillian Sector (1978) is nineteenth in the long-running science fiction series, the
Dumarest saga by E.C. Tubb.
Some background:
The
Dumarest novels are set in a far future galactic culture that spread to many
worlds. Earl Dumarest was born on Earth, but had stowed away on a spaceship
when he was a young boy and was caught. Although a stowaway discovered on a
spaceship was typically ejected to space, the captain took pity on the boy and
allowed him to work his passage and travel on the ship. By the time of the
first volume, The Winds of Gath,
Dumarest has travelled so long and so far that he does not know how to return
to his home planet. Perplexingly, no-one has ever heard of it, other than as a
myth or a legend. It’s clear to him that someone or something has deliberately
concealed Earth's location. The Cyclan, an organization of humans (cybers who
are surgically altered to be emotionless, and on occasion they can link with
the brains of previously living Cyclans, in the manner of a hive mind process,
seem determined to stop him from locating Earth. The cybers can call on the
ability to calculate the outcome of an event and accurately predict results.
An additional incentive for the Cyclan to capture
Dumarest is that he possesses a potent scientific discovery, stolen from them
and passed to him by a dying thief, which would inordinately amplify their
already considerable power and enable them to dominate the human species. Also
appearing in the books is the humanitarian Church of Universal Brotherhood,
whose monks roam many worlds, notably every world where there is war.
Long before the Borg of Star Trek, the Cyclan was
assimilating humans, absorbing them into the collective consciousness.
***
The Cyclan know that their
prey Earl Dumarest is among the worlds of the Rift and Cyber Caradoc is
assigned to find him. And to aid him he has employed the greatest hunter of a
hundred worlds, Bochner, who is not deficient in vaunting hubris. They make
uneasy travelling companions. The cyber without emotion and the hunter who
thrives on the thrill of ‘waiting for the quarry to appear, to aim, to select
the target, to fire, to know the heady exultation of one who has dispensed
death.’ (p14)
Finally they enter the Quillian
Sector, ‘The place where space goes mad. Where the suns fight and fill the
universe with crazed patterns of energy so that men kill at a glance and women
scream at imagined terrors…’ (p17) Navigating through this mad sector is the
spaceship Entil, and Dumarest is a
crew member.
The Cyber is on their trail,
but the strangeness of the sector hampers their tracking ability…
At the Entil’s last stop they picked up passengers and dropped off others,
and Bochner came aboard as a passenger; bear in mind, the Cyclan want Dumarest
alive.
Soon, on the Entil there is jealousy (concerning the
charms of the female engineer Dilys) and sabotage. ‘Once the shimmering haze of
the Erhaft field was down the ship dropped to below light speed, to drift in
the immensity between the stars, to be vulnerable to any wandering scrap of
debris which might cross their path – motes which could penetrate the hull and
larger fragments which would vent their kinetic energy in a fury which would
turn metal into vapour…’
The ship crash-lands and the
survivors, including Dilys, Bochner and Dumarest must face nightmare creatures
and privation – and a confrontation with Cyber Caradoc.
The pace never lets up. This
is yet another fascinating and inventive
adventure.
True, Tubb sticks to a tried
and tested – and clearly popular – formula, with Dumarest constantly moving
between planets and civilisations, encountering women who find him attractive,
fights monsters and villains, often in arena scenarios, and by luck and guile
evades the clutches of the Cyclan cybers. In its day, in the 1970s, if the
special effects had been up to it, the Dumarest Saga would have made great
television.
Editorial comment:
The editor missed the
transposition of the spaceship name from Entil
to Eltin! (p34)
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