Radiant

June 28, 2004
With this Buddhist-tinged military SF novel featuring Admiral Festina Ramos and the Expendables (skilled, dispensable scouts), Aurora Award–winning Canadian author Gardner (Expendable
, etc.) makes a well-earned leap from paperback to hardcover. Explorer Third Class Youn Suu, a scout for the elite Explorer Corps, and her partner Tut set out to rescue the Cashlings from the Balrog, an alien intelligence capable of knowing its enemy's best-laid plans. Accompanied by Admiral Ramos, Youn and Tut travel to an eerie planet that holds the answer to the mystery of the hidden origins of the Explorers. Filled with believably flawed, emotionally involving characters, this entertaining novel of brawn and brains thoughtfully explores questions of honor, culpability and the price of survival. Agent, Richard Curtis.

August 1, 2004
The protagonist of this latest adventure of the Explorer Corps is a young lady named Ugly Screaming Stink-Girl. The name is supposed to bring her luck, but since she is quickly contaminated by a red fungus known as the Balrog, one has to wonder. Then she, Admiral Festina Ramos, and a slightly mad fellow named Tut are assigned to a rescue mission on the planet Muta. There, an entire expedition from the unit has been turned into gas clouds that give out electromagnetic pulses, and it looks as if this is the result of a deadly defense mechanism left behind by an alien race, the Fuentes. It takes the ingenuity and the suffering of all three explorers to discover that the electromagnetic pulses are actually the Fuentes trying to reach a higher state of existence. The sheer complexity of Gardner's characters and inventions will make the book daunting to a good many, but his ingenuity and wit will keep a good many others reading voraciously.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2004, American Library Association.)