kw: book reviews, science fiction, space fiction, alternate history, interplanetary travel
S. M. Stirling is a new author to me, one who adopts a recent trend against having an author's photo on the book jacket, or any revealing VITA. The blurb does state he writes both SciFi and Fantasy. The Sky People is a bit of both.
Imagine that Edgar Rice Burroughs was right, that there are people like us on both Mars and Venus, and that the robot probes of the 1950s and 1960s showed them to us. I imagine that by the 1980s there would have been several visits to each, and a number of residents, not yet colonists.
The premise of the book is that the life on Venus seems to be a jumble of everything from the Mesozoic and Cenozoic, and a fossil record that begins abruptly, with nothing preceding, about 200 million years ago. Not only so, the Venerian creatures' DNA and proteins are compatible with the Terran, so that things from either planet can eat each other. This considerably lightens the load one must carry to Venus for a prolonged stay. It also leads to much risk, because the predators include huge wolves, saber-tooth cats, and allosaurs...and Neandertals.
The Human and Neandertal species are at war, and visiting, Terran, humans naturally get involved. DNA compatibility is subsequently proven.
Hints of an alien, or at least other-worldly, presence appear early, and lead to an interesting conclusion. A connection with the Martian ecology that appears late in the narrative opens plenty of room for sequels.
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