As a kid, I grew up reading Edgar Rice Burroughs and loved his interplanetary tales of romance and adventure. Give me a rocket ship, a sword, and a boon companion, and I would have ridden out at once to fight the most dastardly of villains threatening the most beautiful woman in two worlds.
Sadly, that kind of fiction has almost been killed off by real science rearing its head and declaring that no, we’re not gonna be finding any intelligent life on any planets in our solar system. Sigh. I really wanted a Martian friend. Just one would have been fine. Seriously. But I had to grow up and put the idea of Martians and Venusians behind me.
Thankfully, S. M. Stirling came up with the idea of an alternate history series showcasing intelligent life on Venus and Mars, and wrote two books about those planets. He delivers old school adventure in The Sky People, and I had a blast reading about Ranger Lt. Marc Vitrac, a Cajun-born and bred soldier turned interplanetary security guard and explorer. Vitrac is cut from the same blue-collar roots as many of Burroughs’ heroes, and I found him quite likable from the outset.
I also enjoyed Stirling’s take on what Venus would be like in his postulated 1980s (which seemed a curious choice to me, but I guess that made the history part of the alternate history combo offered). The ICE controls for tapping into the brains of the dinosaur-like creatures was awesome, although I’m sure they weren’t PETA-approved.
Stirling does a lot to point out that the Venus colonists weren’t able to just ship over everything they needed. Most of their tools and supplies have to be manufactured from local materials, and the author succeeds very well at making all of this believable.
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