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Title: The Warriors of Spider
Series: Spider #1
Author: William Gear
Rating: 3.5 of 5 Stars
Genre: SF
Pages: 326
Words: 125K
William Gear is publicly known as “W. Michael Gear”, an author recently known for his “Donovan” series. But he’s been around for quite some time. I hate “public names”, so I’ll be giving the author as “William Gear” because that’s his name.
I read this originally back in middleschool or highschool, because the cover on the paperback at the library looked wicked cool. I have also recently decided to dive into the Donovan series but wanted to read some of Gear’s older stuff so I have a decent comparison for his writing style changes. I believe his wife Kathleen is credited on many of their books (they’ve written something like 90) and I could see her finger prints all over this. The descriptions of the clothing alone would have told me that.
They are also very native american in their theology and beliefs and that aspect comes through loud and clear. Sadly, it’s just the “God is everything and whatever you call god is god” kind of feel-good bullshit. Nothing with actual epistemology. No bones to support things as it were.
The story itself was decent. Cowboys and Indians fighting off space marines and winning. Tragic losses, heroic sacrifices, battles, this story has it all.
Back in the 90’s the library only had this one book and it ended satisfactorily enough that my young self never felt the need to go out to a Barnes & Noble and search out the rest of the trilogy. To be perfectly honest, I could stop right now and call this a standalone and it would be A-OK. But I do have the rest of the trilogy and so I’ll be reading them. Of course, if the empty mumbo-jumbo shamanism gets too heavy, I might just call it a day. But I suspect Gear is a good writer and a story teller first and a preacher second. As it should be for fiction books.
★★★✬☆
From Wikipedia & Bookstooge.blog
Synopsis – Click to Open
The human race consists of billions of people spread throughout a relatively small area of space containing Earth and several other inhabited planets. The majority of the population lives on giant space stations, either in orbit or moving like giant ships. A change occurred over the generations that was caused by zero-gravity conditions and exposure to different radiations. Most are pale-skinned, thin and frail-boned; some would die if they experienced gravity. The human race is ruled over by the Directorate, a group of three genetically modified humans, through whom all information must pass before it is released; this has given the Directorate complete control over information for the last 600 years. They stopped all war and religion and caused humanity to be composed of mostly obedient cowards.
Before this 600-year period, the Soviets ruled humanity after conquering North America. The Native American tribes, angered that the position of reservations had not changed, fought back against the Soviets and succeeded, to the point that they were all loaded onto a giant prison ship and deported to deep space along with other rebels of Latino and Caucasian descent—a population of over 5,000 consisting entirely of people with the will and heritage to survive. The ship crashes onto a planet that they name World. 600 years later the survivors have mixed into many different clans that comprise two distinctly different and opposing peoples, the Spiders and the Santos. Their culture is mainly Native American with the addition of large bore rifles, hand-forged from metal of the wrecked prison ship and used to deal with beings they call “bears,” natural predators existing on World. The World bear is similar to a dragon-squid combination, having two spines that connect at the base and a tentacle on each side with suction cups on it that it shoots toward its prey.
The Directorate accidentally picks up a bit of radio chatter from World, as the warriors use hand radios. They send out the Patrol, a combination military/police force that, under the guidance of the Directorate, has had no violence or wars to quell in over 200 years. They arrive at World expecting to find civilized people barely surviving, as with most other lost stations or colonies. On the contrary, the native warriors are savage fighters following the Native American tradition of “coup” taking, or scalping killed enemies as a method of showing how many they had killed.
They then try to conquer the Romanans, as they take to calling the descendants of the crashed star ship the natives arrived in, the Nicholai Romanan, but find that these natives aren’t going down without a fight, as the Spiders, who believe Spider is the name of God and the Santos, a mix of Christian and Mexican beliefs, who call God Haysoos, are all about warfare and following what they interpret God is telling them what to do.
The Spiders and the Santos form an uneasy alliance and subvert the soldiers. They eventually take over a warship, and the prophet of the Spiders convinces the Top Directorate not to destroy their world. The Romanans survive but are irrevocably changed socially and culturally. The Directorate hires the Romanans as the last real warriors to fight a rebellion starting up in another star system.
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