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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
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.
