Just finished reading : Dragons of Heorot

I've not been playing games much at all lately, so how have I been spending my free time ? Apart from listening to music that is :-)

Latest book to be well and truly devoured is The Dragons of Heorot by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle and Steven Barnes.


It's actually the sequel to the Legacy of Heorot, both books are pictured above. The setting is a planet in orbit of Tau Ceti, a star 10 light years from Earth. The first book has the colony in the early stages of setting up. There's not many of them but unlike a few other colonisation books, they really mean business. Most "new colony" books tend to have the people bringing lots of equipment. That kinda takes up lots of space ... These guys do bring a decent amount of high tech but there's a long term view where they're looking to maintain that technology by building from local materials.

So not so much bringing tanks, guns and steamrollers but bringing the means to build. That said though, they have a main colony defended by a series of electric fences, minefields, heavy machine guns, with that defence being coordinated by a supercomputer. All of the high technology you would expect but technology that seems lacking in most "humans colonise planet" books.

I'm rambling again ! Book 1 has humans vs Grendels ... What's a Grendel ? The name comes from what the colonists think of one of their number, a military man called Cadmann. Because Cadmann is not as confident in the colony's security as the rest of the people, they accuse him of being a "Beowulf" that's looking for a Monsta (think Ray Winstone voice) to fight. That Monsta takes the form of the Grendels ... The image I got was a cross between a mean nasty crocodile and a stegosaurus. But the novelty with the Grendels is they take advantage of "speed". So a tonne or so of armour, spikes and claws that can accelerate to 120km/h in nothing flat.

The first book tells the tale of the colonists struggle to firstly come to terms with what Grendels are and then to survive the onslaught. It has the story of their attempts to conquer the small island they've landed on. Not a bad book but I found it a bit of a struggle. Maybe the committee effect of 3 authors made things a little confused.

The second book takes over the story about 20 years after the first concludes, with the tag line at the back being :

"But the dangers awaiting them on the mainland are far greater than anyone could imagine, for lurking there is something even worse than grendels ... something that eats grendels."

And on that, you're thinking, ok ... grendels are these invincible killing machines. Where humans defeat them by technology, how could anything natural get the better of them ? And I'll say no more there cos it's big plot spoiler stuff :-)

After a slow start (blaming it on being distracted by other things), when I picked this up again last week it didn't take long to finish it. Think 500 pages in under a week :-) There's a good cross section of characters in this one, which helps its readability. There's the exploits of the characters themselves, plus there's a rich ecology which is steadily explored through the book. Whereas the first is mostly Human Vs Grendel, this second book is a lot more Human Vs Planet.

I think the star of these books is Cassandra but then as a self confessed geek, I tend to be highly interested in the technology :-) The problem most sci-fi has is in describing the computer technology available. Some do it well, some not so. Think computers in sci-fi that are less powerful than we have today, that's where it goes wrong. The Cassandra of Heorot is a fully fledged supercomputer AI, which gives the colonists a resource that allows them instant global communication as well as library and analysis tools. It's a lot more advanced than we have now but as a logical progression it seems perfectly reasonable. If you think Jarvis from Iron Man but on a planetary scale, that'll be Cassandra.

To finish up, not a bad pair of books but the sheer power of the grendels made the first book seem a little silly. Worth a read if you're a Niven fan but the Ringworld series of books are a better introduction. Footfall and Lucifer's Hammer are other Niven books I'm going to be reading again sometime soon.

Next book - To Sail Beyond The Sunset by Robert A Heinlein :-)