Crossfire by Nancy Kress. Nancy Kress is in the extremely selective category of "Authors I Started Reading After Their Work Was Assigned in Class." The membership is limited to Kress, Tim O'Brien (The Things They Carried was assigned in a class on Vietnam), and, um...

In her case, the Nebula-winning short story "Out of All Them Bright Stars" was assigned in a class I took one January on Science Fiction. It's a terrific story (you can buy it cheap on the web) and a well-deserved award, and I've kept an eye out for her stuff ever since. I haven't liked anything else as much as "Out of All Them Bright Stars," but when I see her name on a book, I look it over. And, in this case, check it out of the library.

This one's a First Contact novel, of sorts. A mysterious billionaire with a dark secret in his past has arranged a colonization expedition to a distant planet, and attracted an eccentric collection of colonists fleeing an Earth which may or may not be on the brink of disaster. The new colony has exiled Saudi royalty, would-be Cheyenne who want to get back to living in tune with nature even if they have to move to another planet to do so, coldly calculating rich folks, New Quakers seeking a simple life, and a small contingent of military men to run the colony ship and provide security after arrival.

Not long after the colony is established, though, they find a small settlement of furry tool-using aliens. They live in thatched huts, and use stone tools, but DNA and other evidence suggests that they're not native to the planet. While they're trying to solve that puzzle, a second bunch of aliens turns up in a starship, and trouble erupts everywhere. The human colonists suddenly find themselves as pawns in an interstellar war between two groups of incomprehensible aliens, and they're forced to make some difficult choices.

This is a good book, and exactly what I was looking for when I headed off to the library. The colonization program and associated technology are sketched out in enough detail to be believable, but not so much detail as to risk looking silly. The alien cultures are nicely, well, alien, and more is hinted at than is actually described. The human characters are well drawn, and their interactions are generally realistic.

On the other hand, though, the book sets lofty goals for itself, and comes up just short. The interstellar war is used to set up what is meant to be an agonizing moral choice for the human characters, but the two unpalatable options are not balanced enough for the choice to be as difficult as it should. One of the two options is clearly preferable to the other, which undermines the impact of the decision. The ending strives to have the same sort of emotional impact as the end of The Sparrow (a book which has no sequel), but comes up short.

In the end, though, that's almost nit-picking. It's a very well-done book, and the only real failings are through overreach (the dark secret of the billionaire was also underwhelming). It's an engaging story, told well, and even if it fails to pack as much punch as it might, it's still a good read, in the best tradition of SF.

(Originally posted to The Library of Babel.)