Raising Caine (Gannon)

Raising Caine
by Charels Gannon (2015)

(Not a review, just some notes to help me remember the things I've read. But written this way because it's the Internet, and some people will stumble across this page.)

This is the third book in the "Cainverse", which started with Fire With Fire> and Trial By Fire, and in fact follows immediately after the events of Trial By Fire where we meet the representative of the Slaasriithi (a big reveal for book 2). While the Consolidated Terran Republic is near the Arat Kur homeworld, a K’tor ship arrives. We learn more about the K’tor, which takes some of the mystery out of them, and their own representative states the same thing. This causes the Slaasriithi to move up their scheduled trip home because they fear K'tor treachery. As a result, Caine finds himself en route to the current Slaasriithi homeworld.

At the same time, there is a renegade bunch of K'tor who have been, basically, disgraced in the eyes of the familes (to use a Mafia analogy in place of the scientific/genetic one). There are sleeper agents in place that are activated who help take over a Republic ship and try to ambush the Slassriithi ship before Caine can reach their homeworld.

I enjoyed this one a little less because there were spots that it got a little bogged down. For example, it was pretty obvious that the K'tor renegades were going to take over the Republic ship, but it dragged out for several chapters at the beginning of the books, with several POV characters, even though I knew that half of those characters were going to die and their defense would come to naught. The only reason for the protracted struggle, I'm assuming, was so that the ship would have a particular amount of damage and so much of its resources would've been consumed or destroyed. A second contention was the two Slaasriithi planets that the Caine and company set down on. The Slaasriithi don't terraform exactly. They shape their biomes by introducing their own.

The science is over my head, but to its credit, from what I've read outside the book, the science is spot on, making this hard scifi and something that's been hand-waved. One planet is tidal locked to always face its sun, which leaves a habitable ring around the perimeter. Again, there are elements to the story here, and stuff will happen that may make a difference later on, but it seemed to take to long. Ditto for the second planent, until it occurred to me that the book would finish here and that they wouldn't make it to the homeworld before it ended. Caine's previous encounters with the primitive Slaasriithi proved invaluable to his survival as well as defending a water strider on this planet. Even as a saboteur was in their mix.

I did enjoy the book, and Caine and company are still pressed into service, if only because they know that going back to Earth and rejoining civilization is impossible. They'll all wind up in some "retirement community" where they'll be watched over for the remainders of their lives, no matter what anyone promises.

I did try to finish this be the end of 2023, but there were still 100-200 pages remaining, so it became the first of 2024.

Other stuff to read before I move on to "Caine's Mutiny". Gannon has a way with titles.

Disclosure stuff: I've met Gannon on a few occasions at a science fiction convention. We've hit some of the same parties. "Acquaitances", not "friends".

I also write Fiction! Thank you for finding and reading my page. You can now order my newest book Burke's Lore, Briefs: A Heavenly Date / My Damned Best Friend, written by Christopher J. Burke, which contains the aforementioned story and a bonus story. Order the softcover or ebook at Amazon.
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Fire With Fire (Gannon)

Fire With Fire
by Charles E. Gannon (2014)

(Not a review, just some notes to help me remember the things I've read. But written this way because it's the Internet, and some people will stumble across this page.)

This is a book that I should've read quite a while ago. I've met Chuck Gannon on a couple of occasions. The second time, he remembered me from the first time, and even congratulated me on being published, which was something that I'd been trying to do the first time. The group discussion we had might've contained some spoilers, but I'm sure I'll forget them by the time I get that far into the series.

Update: Okay, it's been almost a month and I haven't gotten back to this or to the books that came after it. Real life gets in the way. Luckily, this is a popular series, so synopsies can be found online. My main reason for having this blog is to remind myself about the books I read in the past when I don't recall the details. (Hell, there are books that I don't even remember reading contained in this blog.) This novel isn't likely to become one of those.

At the very basic level, Caine Riordan is a "polymath", a person who can sees a lot of things and assemble facts out of them. He sees things differently from other people, but not in any science fictiony way. He is found someplace he shouldn't be, and we are to assume that he could be a spy or saboteur or something, so the captain of that ship puts him in deep freeze, suspended animation for long voyages. He is this placed in a different deep freeze and kept there for over a decade. This causes memory issues, and he doesn't remember anything about the last day before he was arrested.

He's promised that he'll be told about it, but he's needed to do some work for the government. He's sent to a planet and finds evidence of extra-terrestrial life, which is inconvient to the megacorporation that's doing work there. Several attempts on his life later, and he's reporting in that the life he found there couldn't have built the structures that he found. They had to have been built by humans thousands of years ago. He further deduces that another alien species must've brought humans and the creatures that he met there thousands of years ago.

It's finally revealed to him that there are alien caretakers in space, and they have been in contact. And now Riordan is part of a diplomatic team that is going to some kind of galactic United Nations where they define borders and boundaries of space and such. Diplomatic problems ensue. This is the second part of the book, and almost feels like a second book, but it comes back to Earth, and old threads are picked up.

Throughout the book, there is a mysterious man who likes to eat olives who has a box with a button on it. He presses the button and someone (a specific target) dies. At first, I thought it was going to be some kind of nanobot thing associated with other people eating olives, but it's even more sciencey than that.

I have book two out of the library and just need time to sit and read it. This next one will be a trade paperback, which are slower reads for me these days.

I enjoyed it, and it really picked up once I got into it. I don't know why I had a few false starts with this book in the past.