Dark Piper by Andre Norton

[james_davis_nicoll]

Dark Piper by Andre Norton

Comments

[w. dow rieder (from livejournal.com)]

Sounds like another book for the "too depressing in ultimate outlook for me to want to read" category.

[neowolf2.livejournal.com]

The problem is that any setting with practical interstellar travel, and multiple independently arisen intelligent species, is going to be grimdark, if the consequences of the setting are honestly explored.

[scentofviolets.livejournal.com]

The other obvious fix is to posit some mechanism whereby nearby intelligent species are at approximately the same level of technology. The default is assuming there is no such animal, of course, which is where a lot of the grimdark comes from, IMHO.

[neowolf2.livejournal.com]

The situation isn't grimdark because of tech disparity; it's grimdark because of Fermi. The Great Filter is going to obliterate everybody.

[w. dow rieder (from livejournal.com)]

There are several ways around that. I'm using one in my fiction, which I won't spoil, but if you have several independent origin civilizations at near the same tech level who manage to contact each other, you already have something with a low prior probability to consider at the worldbuilding stage.
Any solution is going to affect the answer to the Fermi question, and the possible Great Filters.

[scentofviolets.livejournal.com]

That's assuming STL; in the Nortonverse you have FTL. All bets are off then. The Forerunners probably aren't Turing computable.

[heron61.livejournal.com]

Pretty much. I dearly love Norton's work and have read everything she wrote more than once, but I failed to fully reread this one (which I first read when quite young) because partway through, I remembered just how grim it was. It's the only Norton I've read where at the end of the novel the protagonists are clearly doomed, even The X Factor looks positively uplifting compared to this novel.

[bruce munro (from livejournal.com)]

Grimdark Piper?

(Saving kids from vaporization would seem to be _less_ dark than seizing kids in lieu of unpaid debts, but perhaps the living will envy the dead?)

[seth ellis (from livejournal.com)]

Morally Ambiguous Piper
Mid-Grey Piper
Neutral Earth Tones Piper

[awesomeaud.livejournal.com]

Doing-the-best-he-can Piper.

He can't save the whole colony, but he manages to save the kids. He may have had some plan beyond that, but his death kills that option.