“You’re a sensualist, and a stoic, a libertine and a Spartan. You make love and death with equal facility. You are that most intriguing of candidates, a genuine mystery.”
So we’re in the third year of a global pandemic and we’ve got what could quickly become a global conflict starting in Ukraine. A little interplanetary escapism in the form of a thirty-year old science fiction series by Ray Aldridge? THANKS, DON’T MIND IF I DO.
Book one had Ruiz Aw – adventurer, enforcer for the Art League corporation, and all around terrifying killer-for-hire – assigned to find out who was poaching valuable slaves from the planet Pharaoh. Well, he found out who the culprit is, and he even managed to free several of the kidnapped Pharaohans from the slave pits on the planet Sook (including the beautiful Nisa, who he’s shocked to realize is the love of his life.) All he has to do now is get his band of refugees off-planet without getting caught by the slaver he stole them from, or murdered by one of the millions of pirates inhabiting this pirate planet.
The Emperor of Everything is the sequel to The Pharaoh Contract, but it’s a completely different adventure with an entirely different feel. Book one was in many ways a spy novel, with Ruiz going undercover, infiltrating a slave organization on behalf of a different slave organization, and slowly discovering his growing impulse to protect people, to actually care. Book two is darker, and much more brutal. One of Ruiz’s first actions in the book is to kill one of the other members of his band. He does it to save himself (and Nisa, of course), and there’s a good chance he and his entire group would have died otherwise. But he doesn’t even really think about it before he does it, and it’s not the only time that happens.
Being on the run with no ship, very few weapons, with a band of shell-shocked former slaves, while the enraged slaver Corean chases them across the planet means the tension is pretty much relentless. There’s a brief interlude when the group rides an, ahem, adult-themed barge down a canal, enjoying mysteriously-provided food and providing some quiet moments for sexy good-times between Nisa and the ever more besotted Ruiz. But then they’re quickly pulled into the SeaStack, the ocean crime-city of rotting skyscrapers (most of which extend even further under the water than they do into the sky), where the ruling body has decided the one verboten action once you enter is leaving. To get off-planet, Ruiz is forced to make a deal with one of the most dangerous people in the city, a powerful lunatic who’ll most likely kill Ruiz the second he gets what he wants.
Oddly enough, Corean ends up doing much the same thing with a different powerful and unhinged lunatic in her attempts to capture Ruiz and recover her slaves. The plot bounces between the two characters, so you spend a good part of the book anxiously waiting for their storylines to intersect.
The planet where all of this is taking place, Sook, is weird. The carnival-funhouse barges shaped like gigantic naked humans take Ruiz and his band to a cult centered around immortality and sex. Corean’s henchmen include a couple of cat-faced fighters and an unstoppable insect-like alien known only as a Mocrassar. There are hints at an underground society of people who stopped being human centuries ago, we get endlessly creepy images of SeaStack (one of my favorites being a body tumbling soundlessly past the ledge of a pit hundreds of meters across and too deep to see either the top or the bottom), and surreal moments like a water-filled canal extending past a cliff’s edge and into the open sky.
And all of it is stupefyingly dangerous, sometimes overwhelmingly so. There’s an entire one-sided battle that takes place between sections, a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it slaughter. Even Ruiz, who spent most of his life shooting, stabbing, or manipulating his way out of trouble reaches a point where he just wants it to stop.
He wanted to give up, to go back out to the sunlight and the crates of turnips, to forget everything that had gone before, to change his name and become another person, someone who wouldn’t have to go down to whatever waited at the bottom of the shaft.
I’m sometimes a little surprised that this book was published as recently as the 90’s, because it occasionally feels very much like 50’s pulp sci-fi. There are several instances of someone just happening to have the technology they need on-hand at just the right moment (although that can be due to the author’s ability to create an entire universe of tech, more on that later), and the antagonists can be just a liiiitle two-dimensional. (Flomel, damn. That guy gets backhanded, choked out, and otherwise stomped on multiple times and he still never seems to understand the reality of Not Being In Charge Anymore.) The women in the story exist mostly to pant after Ruiz; there are two obligatory Woman Languidly Soaping Her Breast scenes, one of them Nisa daydreaming of sex with Ruiz, the other of Corean doing, well, exactly the same thing, except her daydream ends with plans to kill Ruiz afterward in several creative ways.
What elevates this book, and what keeps me coming back for more of the dwindling supply of Ray Aldridge stories I haven’t read yet, is his fantastic skill with world-building. Practically every page has fascinating information about life from several different alien worlds. Sometimes Aldridge will explain things, sometimes he just tosses off a tantalizing detail about a drug, or a religion, or a weapon, and leaves the reader to wonder how the heck something like that could have come about. Crowd scenes are dazzling with variety, every person wandering through a noisy private club could have an entire short story written about them, and even a quick list of hired killers hints at a much larger universe.
His squad so far consisted of: a much-scarred graduate of the downlevel blood stadia, a cyborg clone of the famous emancipator Nomun, two solemn women from Jahworld who were expert pinbeamers, and a beaster-addict who favored the wolverine persona.
I’m still a little sorry that Ray Aldridge is no longer writing, since this means that Book 3 is the final appearance by the enigmatic hero Ruiz Aw. I’m curious to see how Aldridge ends Ruiz’s adventures in book 3 though, and hey, after that I still have twenty-two more stories of his to read before I run out. Now taking recommendations for the next one to read. Or even better, some tips on where to find copies for sale. I was able to buy the long out-of-print novels on ebay, but what I’d really like is to start an illicit trade of back-issues of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction that featured his work. I’ve got a small collection already; hook a girl up with “The Beauty Addict” or “Hyena Eyes” and I might let you have “The Spine Divers” or “Gate Of Faces” cheap.