TRAITOR'S RUN

An Earth-based space empire exploits and enslaves Milky Way civilizations for its own selfish benefit while a crablike alien refugee and an outcast human warrior try to oppose its latest crimes.

Stevenson’s far-future SF series opener focuses on evil space invaders who happen to be human—an order called the Hegemony, which arose in the aftermath of a traumatic but victorious (though scarcely described in any detail) interplanetary war. Hegemony policy assures the safety of humankind by incorporating spacegoing alien civilizations in what is supposedly a protective alliance akin to the storied Federation of the Star Trek franchise. In fact, the oppressive arrangement subjugates and weakens the Hegemony’s coalition planets, making them little more than Earth vassals and underclasses. Rhees Lowrans, an eager human fighter pilot for the Hegemony, accidentally causes the death of a close comrade in a training exercise and is punished with a transfer to the much-disliked intelligence branch. There, she learns inside dirt about a mystery attack on nonhuman colonies in which Hegemony military might did nothing to avert the slaughter of 13 billion aliens. In a parallel narrative (barely intersecting in this installment), Udun is a rare, space-traveling member of the Kresz—intelligent humanoid arthropods (“like a cross between a crab and a lobster but with only two arms and two legs, though these were strangely jointed and much longer than a human’s”) with an isolationist culture. Udun’s unheard-of voyages beyond Kresz territory give him ominous clues of an approaching crisis, but he is unprepared for the ruthless barbarism of the Hegemony. The captivating story ends at a turning point, and readers will eagerly look forward to the sequel. The author’s gift for xenofiction matches that of genre grandmasters like Hal Clement, Larry Niven, and C.J. Cherryh. Stevenson gets under the alien skins (or carapaces) and unique emotional makeup of the Kresz characters to the point that readers begin to see the ultimately amoral Homo sapiens as grotesque and “other” as any bug-eyed monster on the cover of yesteryear’s SF pulps. Comparisons between the Hegemony’s malevolence and real-world developments should be evident even without the words Homeland Security ever being deployed.

A potent SF depiction of humanity victimizing peaceful aliens.