A Gathering of Widowmakers

Having read and enjoyed Resnick's Starship series (watch for Starship: Flagship due out in December 2009) I decided to give the Widowmaker series a try. Since I enjoy the feel of a hardback and apparently the first 3 in the series were only published in PBs, I started with Gathering first. I read for entertainment not for education, tho I'm not opposed to learning something along the way. This novel had a good flow to it, was not bogged down with technical jargon and held my interest from beginning to end. Time to start the first 3 in the series now; PBs here I come.

It is a crime--a crime, I say!--that the publisher collapsed before giving this book the exposure it deserved. The original trilogy was impressive, but this book managed to top them. Resnick explores questions of identity and individuality, and also examines what it means to be Simply the Best, in a thoroughly engrossing and entertaining story. If you haven't read the trilogy, skip the rest of this review. There are spoilers. This is the book of the third clone, Jeff, but it also heavily features the original Jefferson. We also see a lot of Ito, a thoroughly competent bounty hunter who nonetheless looks like a clown when standing next to a Widowmaker--any Widowmaker. The surviving previous clone, who has changed his name to Jason, is present more as a plot device and point of comparison than as a well-developed character. This is fine, because Resnick is showing us extremes--the gray-haired man and the inexperienced kid, the thinker who's always stacking every odd in his favor and the doer who believes that bounty hunting involves only a few minutes of actual work. Both are extremely good, in extremely different ways. But what happens when a situation requires Jeff's superhuman reflexes *and* Jefferson's cunning? Some other points are also indirectly explored, such as how the Widowmaker (either of them) really feels about this Ito character who keeps following him around and saying that he serves the Widowmaker. We can only hope that the rights have reverted to Mr. Resnick, so that he can republish this somewhere else. Until then, if you can't get your hands on a copy, beg your local library to find one through Interlibrary Loan. After Resnick has kept you up all night, you'll be glad you did--and you may even find yourself wishing that, like Ito, you could devote your life to serving the Widowmaker.

Resnick delivers another great book - we get plenty of backstory, and see what really makes the Widowmaker. No fan of the series should miss this book!