Subject: Review: Mother of Demons by Eric Flint

From: [email-masked] (P.D. TILLMAN)
Date: 10 Jul 2000 11:11:13 -0400

Mother of Demons by Eric Flint	
	    Review copyright 2000 Peter D. Tillman

Rating: "A" -- well-done military-political SF, with good historical and
scientific underpinnings. Recommended.

A human starship has crash-landed on Ishtar, a planet inhabited by the
gukuy, Bronze-age land squid. First contact is violent, and the humans
(who are the titular demons) soon find themselves forced to take sides in
a tribal war....

This sort of thing has been done, umm, once or twice before, but seldom as
well as here. Flint's aliens are well thought-out and biologically
plausible. The tiny human colony's predicament is nicely portrayed: one of
the human leaders is a historian, and she is painfully aware of how good
intentions can lead to monstrous evil.

There are some first-novel rough spots -- Flint's exposition is lumpy and
sometimes preachy -- but he's an outstanding storyteller, which more than
makes up for the (minor) problems. Recommended.

Mother of Demons was Flint's first novel, and attracted little notice on
publication -- I'm sure sales weren't helped by Baen mislabelling the book
as a fantasy. His new solo novel 1632, which plops a contemporary American
town into Europe's Thirty Years' War, has been getting good notices -- I
just put it on my "to-read" list -- which might help bring Mother of
Demons the larger audience it deserves.

Thanks to Sean Fagan, who recommended Mother of Demons AWB, and to Jordan
Bassior and Jorj Strumolo, who wrote good things about the book in
rec.arts.sf.written

Link:  http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=067187800X/
has an interesting and spoiler-free set of readers' comments.
Amazon's rating: 4.5/5 (8 readers).

And for "1632":
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0671578499/

%A Eric Flint
%T Mother of Demons
%D 1997
%I Baen
%O US$6
%P 336 pp.
%G ISBN 067187800X
%O In print

Read more of my reviews:
http://www.silcom.com/~manatee/reviewer.html#tillman