The Rosetta Codex

October 24, 2005
In this oddly old-fashioned and low-key space opera from Philip K. Dick Award–winner Russo (Ship of Fools
), Cale Alexandros, the heir to a great mercantile family who's abandoned at age five on a backwater planet, grows up among savages. Barely surviving into adulthood, Cale makes his way out of the wasteland to the planet's one civilized city, where he discovers the Resurrectionists, a cult dedicated to unearthing the ancient technologies of an extinct alien race, and begins to understand the meaning of the Rosetta Codex, a strange artifact he himself discovered in the wasteland. Cale must also deal with the mysterious Blackburn and his employers, the Borg-like Sarakheen, who want the artifact for themselves. After regaining control of the Alexandros family holdings on another planet, Cale sets off on a journey that will transform the galaxy, his goal nothing less than the resurrection of the ancient aliens who created the codex. Russo's landscapes and technologies are nicely alien, but readers will have trouble attaching to his somewhat flat protagonist, whose motives for bringing the aliens back to life remain unclear.

November 15, 2005
Marooned in the wastelands of Conrad's World when his family's ship crashed en route to the city of Morningstar, five-year-old Cale remembers very little, except that his father told him to mention his last name, Alexandros, only to the people they were going to visit. For years, he is a slave, shuffled between groups of exiled thugs, until a trader offers him a way out. On the subsequent journey, Cale finds, in ruins deep in the desert, a strange metal book in an entirely unfamiliar language. Crossing the bridge to Morningstar and finding work, he also finds the Resurrectionists, who search for the truth about an alien civilization that used to exist on Conrad's World. Eventually, Cale discovers what his family was and the possibility of strange truths about the book from the desert, by which time he is in a race with those who want those truths for their own nefarious purposes. Russo's tale skirts the doldrums of predictability but finally hits its stride and balances adventure and mystery in a satisfying entertainment.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2005, American Library Association.)