🚀 go-pugleaf

                           Lovelock
         Orson Scot Card and Kathryn Kidd

What can I say, <A HREF="http://www.hatrack.com/">Orson Scott Card</A> nearly 
always manages to bring a lump to my throat and sometimes even a tear to my 
eye. And he doesn't use soap opera tricks to do it.  OSC believes that at the 
core of a good story must be a moral dilemma -- damned if you do and damned if 
you don't.  He gets you so far into his character's skins that when the 
dilemma arrives you experience it almost first hand.  Which choice the 
protaganist will make is often not obvious and always at least somewhat 
painful. But don't think OSC is on a bummer trip amigos, his characters are 
bold and capable of making the best of a bad situation while discovering their 
own flaws and learning to cope with them.  OSC can take you up and down the 
emotional scale with the sure hand of a master.

What Kathryn Kidd brings to this novel, IMHO, is a depth of characterization 
and character interaction that OSC has not demonstrated in previous novels.  I 
am sure that many of the plot and setting details were her contributions as 
well, and these served to make this a work different then what OSC might have 
produced on his own, but  the detailed and comprehensive, emotional and 
dynamic interplay between the characters did not just change what this work 
might have been, it strengthened and shaped the story synergisticaly and the 
result is a better novel than the always excellent OSC might have otherwise 
written. 

The story is told by Lovelock, an enhanced capuchin monkey with intelligence 
well into the human genius range.  He was created as a commercial product to 
serve as historian and aide to an important person.  The important person 
Lovelock  belongs to, Carol Jeanne Cocciolones, is a preeminent  "Gaiologist", 
a scientist / engineer specializing in ecosystems. They are on a large 
starship traveling at less than lightspeed (but fast enough that time dilation 
is significant) to a distant planet to help establish a colony.  

One day Lovelock realizes that he is a slave and quietly rebels. Most of the 
humans regard him as a thing, a tool, an animal.  His value to them is in his 
functionality. He discovers that if he is deemed disfunctional he will be 
destroyed. The only freedoms available to him are on the sly and between his 
ears.  To describe his struggle with bonds he did not even suspect he had or 
his covert acts of rebellion  would spoil some of the richness that permeates 
this evocative examination of mental bondage and manipulation, of users and 
the used, of oppression and rebellion.   

  Highly recommended.

(I've pushed this novel onto two of my friends and they both loved it as 
well.)

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The map IS NOT the territory! -- Korzybski  (emphasis added)
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