Zenya (Dumarest #11) 3Stars

 

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Title: Zenya
Series: Dumarest #11
Author: EC Tubb
Rating: 3 of 5 Stars
Genre: SF
Pages: 182
Words: 53K
Publish: 1974

The adventures are wearing thin because Tubb can only come up with so many plausible ways for Earl to get screwed over time after time. Does Earl find a planet with a princess who loves him? Too bad. Does Earl make a killing in the market and become a space kajillionaire? Too bad!

It doesn’t matter. Tubb screws Earl Dumarest every chance he gets and I for one am getting bored. Plus, Earl can just have his memory looked at and get the coordinates of Earth, but he won’t because of the magic boojum scienze thingy “that is too dangerous for anyone to have”, except Earl of course.

I think this will be the last 3 star read and I strongly think my next Dumarest will be my last. The artificial way that the author keeps Earl from achieving his goal is becoming too great for me to overlook any more.

Also, I am getting SUPER sick and tired of the women in these stories either going insane, being insane or getting killed, to prevent them from staying with Earl. Once again, it is glaringly artificial and it really grates, like sandpaper on your forearm.

★★★☆☆

From Devilreads

Earl Dumarest is a man lost in space. Sort of. He stowed away on a ship leaving Earth when he was only ten. The old Captain, childless, had taken pity on him and let him work off his passage. Ever since he'd been moving outward into the galaxy, Though biologically only early middle age, owing to the vagaries of space ship travel, he's much older. Low passage is basically for animals, a suspended animation. People use it though because it's cheap and most use it even though dangerous: there's a fifteen percent death rate of users. Earl had used it often. High passage is for the rich, and Earl used it whenever he was flush, where metabolism is sped up and time passes much more slowly for the user.
Now he wants to go home.
Here's the problem: in this far flung future, humanity has spread throughout the Milky Way, literally millions of inhabited planets, and most have never heard of Earth. "A planet named Dirt! Ridiculous!" Those who have heard it believe it's a myth. "The idea that Humans came from one planet! Ridiculous!"
Earl knows Earth, Terra, is real. Old and war torn even when he was a child, Lord knows what it's like now. But it's home. He searches for clues in libraries on the various planets he visits, picking them up now and again, building an area of the Milky Way where it has to lie.
He's pursued every step of the way by the Cyclans, those cyborg/computer beings of Cylcon, who want the secret he didn't even know he possessed, a gift from a woman, for a long time. It was stolen from the Cyclans before they could use it, a method to control humanity, and they want it back.
Earl is just as determined that they won't get it.
Earl is on Paiyar visiting an old library when he's picked up by the beautiful Zenya who says her grandfather wants to see him. And when old Chan Parect, Aihult of the Serpent Clan, speaks, everyone jumps.
It doesn't take Earl long to get the measure of the old man. crazy as a loon, the clan is inbred and all of them are privileged and not used to the realities of life. He wants his son found, he's been off-planet since before Zenya was born. He's blackmailed into the hunt, pushed by grandson of the Aihult into a fight. As with the spoiled rich, the boy thinks he's better than Earl. But earl has fought to many battles in the arena and easily wins, sparing the boy's life. Not satisfied, the boy tries to murder him late that night, Earl supposedly drugged, and this time doesn't survive.
Earl, though, is knocked unconscious and when he comes around is given the news, Find the old man's son or a device implanted in his body will be turned on and the Cyclans given the frequency, making him a beacon easy to find anywhere in the galaxy.
Chard is the planet where the son was last seen. it's a woar-torn planet, a new war, and it's full of brightly uniformed rich boys playing at war more than anything. Earl poses as a war chieftain from a mercenary planet in order to get on planet and is soon embroiled in the battle, training the posers and trying to find out who the enemy really is. The primitives they are supposedly fighting can't really be the enemy. Earl can see that. No evidence of them is ever found in the destroyed villages. But they are blinded in their hate.
Earl must first solve that problem before he can get to his. Which he does and then the heir is murdered by his insane aunt. So much for Dumarest and Earth.

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