Helix and the Sword (Orbit Books)

I first read this book when it came out in the 80s. What I found that I'd remembered clearly, after re-reading it just now, is the author's world-building... or, rather, his ability to create a home for humanity in our solar system but without Earth. The other well conceived premise is based on the solar system's relative flatness -- the "plate" for planetary orbits -- and the pirates who live in the Hemisphere, without the planets to draw upon. Other reviewers mention the synes, the living organisms that serve the role of machines (with varying degrees of sentience, such as an encylopedia living in a cheetah with limited telepathy). All of that is impressive. The story suffers a bit from its background. Sometimes the synes are better written than the main characters, and there's a towering amount of exposition (the author couldn't find another way to tell 6,000 years worth of history); that keeps this from being a truly excellent book. I did enjoy it, however, and I think you will, too.

I lent this book out years ago to a friend and never got it back - my loss and a major one at that! I would rate this book as being amongst the best Sci Fi I have ever read, on a scale in richness and complexity with Dune - though Dune would possibly win by a hair :-) The ending while fascinating is possibly a little *too* romantic...I know of only one other book by the author and would very much like to know if John McLoughlan has written any more books apart from Toolmaker Koan - email me on [email protected] if you know.

This is a very interesting, and in many ways presicient, work of science fiction. The author created a compelling future world based on genetic engineering well before these ideas were common. He incorporated religous and mythic elements into the story in a particularly creative manner. The writing is very good. This book is a fine combination of technological extrapolation and story telling. The best comparisons I can think of for this book, and this is a considerable compliment, are books of Arthur Clarke's such as the City and the Stars. If you are a science fiction fan, and find a copy of this book, buy it and read it.

"The Helix and the Sword" is one of those books that restores faith in SF. McLoughlin's style is elegant and often surprisingly powerful, and the plot is interesting. His characters are sometimes a little weak - the protagonist seems to react rather than act throughout the book - but his depiction of a feudal space-based society based on genetic engineering is the best backdrop since "Dune."

This is a little-known book by a little-known writer, but it deserves to be much better known.The story takes place about 5000 years in the future and concerns the efforts of a small group of people to survive against the backdrop of a violent war between two cruel dictatorships in the Asteroid Belt. The central characters are menaced not only by the violence of war and the harsh environment of outer space, but also by the random terror inflicted on them by their own governments. This is a gripping story, impossible to put down.The world described is utterly unique, unlike anything I have ever seen before in science fiction. Civilization is based, not on machines made of steel and glass, using electricity and nuclear power, but on specialized forms of life. Space travel is achieved, not with spaceships using chemical rockets, fusion rockets, or gravity drives, but inside vast creatures vaguely like whales, which use photosynthesis for energy and solar sails for propulsion. Creatures used for war generally use rockets, which are described as being "wasteful of matter". Other writers have explored this idea, notable Jack Vance in his classic "The Dragon Masters", but no one else has done it so thoroughly and so well.The plot is well thought out and seamless, with no internal inconsistencies. The engineering, both social and mechanical, is very well done, with no major errors that I could detect. Contrast this with the popular Honor Harrington series, where the engineering can only be described as sloppy and riddled with errors, and the action often drags unbearably while the author tells us things we have no wish to know.I don't agree with the other reviewer that the story is "cheesy" or the style mediocre. The author seems to be using a style that was popular in the eighteenth century, but it reads much more smoothly than anything I have read that was actually written in the eighteenth century. In this he resembles William Hope Hodgson, who used a similar tactic in his classics "The Night Land" and "The Boats of the Glen Carrig". I find this to be a refreshing change from the run-of-the-mill style used by everyone else.If John McLoughlin ever writes any more fiction, I will buy it at once. Unfortunately, he is not a professional writer. His books are labors of love, small in number but highly polished. In this he strongly resembles such writers as J. R. R. Tolkien and Mervyn Peake. No doubt this is why his book is so well put together compared to those in the Honor Harrington series, which appear to be cranked out on an assembly line without enough time to weed out the gross violations of the laws of nature which are so characteristic of those books.