After a world falls to an alien attack, a man tries to rouse humanity to the rescue by arming a space vessel and harassing the alien ships, all in the name of a woman he once loved.

I had a lot of trouble getting into this book, something that it shares with many classics that I’ve read in recent years. The book is written in three semi-independent parts, which makes the story very disjointed. The writing itself was a little difficult, and many passages required rereading to figure out what happened. I haven’t seen books written with so much of a second language. The German was lost to me, but I can read French fluently, so I didn’t miss anything from that untranslated dialog. The first part jumps around through several plots, from trying to drum up support for a rescue mission to a kidnapping, and held little interest. The second part, though, as they traipse across the alien planet, was very boring, despite the mild obstacles and deaths they faced. As with Ringworld, the world itself wasn’t interesting enough to hold my interest. The third part was better, and raised my estimation of the book, in the infiltration and especially the twist near the end. Unfortunately, the ending jumps over most of the resolution, which left me feeling rather flat about the whole book.

I suspect this was originally written in three parts and published in the SF magazines of the day, because they are fairly independent of each other, though they share the same overall thread. The main character is Gunnar Heim, a former naval officer who is upset about the loss of the New Europe colony world to the alien Aleronians. His daughter Lisa features heavily into a strange potential romance with the much older minstrel Endre Vadasz. She then disappears and we barely hear about her again.

The politics of Earth are explained rather well through the interaction between Heim and the French representative to the Earth Federation. It seems like the world has come together, to prevent annihilation, but each member state has a lot of independence. The Federation controls the police force and anything to do with inter-species interactions. We’re presented with at least three alien species in this book, from the cerulean engineer to the arms-dealing Staurni to the Aleronians, who have existed for a lot longer than humanity and are afraid that humans will grow into a large threat in the distant future, and so are curbing their expansionist tendencies by invading New Europe.

Heim finds Endre Vadasz drunk and singing French songs, but with proof that New Europe was not destroyed as was claimed. So he goes on a hunt to find people who will support him in his attempt to push the Aleronians back. It seems that nobody on Earth is willing to risk war, even though Heim believes the Aleronians will continue to prey on human colonies, despite their stated intentions of clearing a space around their star.

Heim and the French liaison hatch a plan to outfit a cruiser with a small crew of like-minded people, exercising France’s right to defend its colony without the navy. For that intention, Lisa is kidnapped, which sends Heim into a desperate plan to kidnap one of the Aleronian higher-ranked officials to ransom him back from the pacifist kidnappers. The plot is very disjointed, hopping from meetings to planning to suddenly being in orbit and pretending to crash on Ascension Island, where they are hiding the Aleronian delegate. Heim drops him off in exchange for his daughter. Then he leaves her with her grandfather and takes off into space, finally deciding he is the only one who can captain the ship.

Given the dire urgency of rescuing the people on New Europe, it’s hard to believe that Heim would spend so much time on Staurni, though it wasn’t his fault he was stranded there. While getting his cruiser outfitted with missiles, an archaeology team shows up on another ship. It seems like a big coincidence, especially when an old girlfriend is part of the crew. They spend the time having sex on her ship, talking about old times, especially the time she was in the peace movement and tried to recruit him. So it’s not much of a surprise when she forces him out of a scout craft at gunpoint, intent on stopping his rogue mission to save New Europe. This story, at least, isn’t disjointed, but unfortunately it’s boring. Heim and Vadasz gain the upper hand on Jocelyn’s other crew members, losing one of their crew, but forcing the peace-men to march over dangerous terrain, where they lose one of their enemies at a time. They survive the marching trees, which were kind of neat, but lose Jocelyn’s boss to the crazy leftover war machines, and then Jocelyn herself in the waterlands. Heim ignites his air in the hydrogen atmosphere to create an explosion which is seen by flying Staurni, who rescue him and his two crewmates. We don’t get to see that part, but I guess it’s not that important, as we’re told of the aftermath. I’m sure it would have been more interesting, though, than the trek across the hydrogen-atmosphere planet.

It looks like a staple of classic hard science fiction that the authors felt the need to show us new planets with strange phenomena, but seem unable to make it interesting. I felt the same about the classic Ringworld, which was so dull despite the novelty of the world. This planet, which had some admittedly strange stuff, and the ecology and interactions were well described, was equally boring because of the slow plotting.

The third part of the book was more to my linking, though we also miss what could have been the most interesting part –the war itself. Heim finally has a mission. He’s been conducting hit-and-runs against the Aleronia for months, now, and when the story begins, he intercepts a transport filled with human prisoners, on the way to a prisoner exchange. He takes the ship without bloodshed, something he’s managed to do every time so far, and when he learns that the woman he loved on New Europe so many years earlier is still alive and in hiding, he decides to infiltrate the planet and rescue her. He uses the excuse that he’ll take a hundred women and children to Earth, to plea their case and show the world that they are still alive, but he’s lying to himself, and his commanders know it.

After another sudden jump in time, they’ve disguised the captured transport in the wake of an asteroid that the Fox II has captured and thrown at the planet. They follow it in and submerge in a river, where they find the resistance with the help of one of the former captives, a ranking officer. There is an interlude where he meets his former love, Madelon, who is happily married (I think the comment that she was rather plump after childbirth was very unnecessary, even given the age of the book) and has a teenaged daughter. It’s doubly uncomfortable that he pursues the daughter, who is barely older than his own daughter. He romances her, and gets jealous when Endre also romances her, the same as he did with Lisa.

A deadline is revealed here, in that the critical vitamin C pills (because the planet doesn’t produce any) are running low, so they have to get as many colonists off planet as soon as possible. It was my impression that the negotiations with the Aleronians was supposed to be a distraction while they loaded a hundred colonists onto the ship for escape, but when they get back, it’s almost empty. Heim is with the negotiating party as an observer, dressed as a French colonist. In a cool twist, though, Cynbe is the chief military strategist on the planet –the very same Aleronian who he kidnapped in the first story. He’s recognized, and the negotiations are revealed as a fraud. It’s unclear to me when the other colonists were released and made their way back to the camp –wouldn’t the Aleronians have followed them anyway to capture the rest? Regardless, I think their freedom was traded for Heim’s voluntary submission.

It turns out that Cynbe was genetically created with the ability to think more like a human, but he falls woefully short, as shown by Heim. Cynbe has been hunting Heim and the Fox II for months, unsuccessfully. He conveniently reveals the fact that he has only one warship in orbit and two recalled from the outer solar system on their way back, because he thinks they landed the Fox II. Heim doesn’t disabuse him of his error. Heim challenges Cynbe to a walk in the human town, to show how inadequate his programming is, and ends up throwing him off a bridge into the river, assuming the guards would rescue Cynbe before looking for the human captives –because the Aleronian planet doesn’t have rivers and oceans, and so they can’t swim, nor know how to deal with water in general.

Heim and Endre make their way back to the transport, and with the help of a commander I thought was still captive, figure a way to get past the Aleronian warship in orbit. Fox II, which has been hiding behind the largest moon, intercepts one of the incoming warships, while Heim crashes into the other. Fox deals with the orbital ship, and rescues Heim.

Ironically, in a book that seemed way too long for its length, at this point, it’s too short. The last chapter shows that Heim remains on New Europe, Endre has married Madelon’s daughter Helen, the war is over (but not bloodless, which shows that some battles were fought), and that the Aleronians have been put in their place, understanding that Earth won’t back down or give away colonies, and that human warships are superior.

This proves Heim’s original argument at the start of the book, that the Aleronians needed to be shown some resistance, otherwise they would continue to restrict humanity’s movement into the galaxy (here called the universe). The pacifists, who want to avoid war at all costs, are shown to be the potential cause of humanity’s downfall, but the general population has changed because of what Heim did, showing the pacifists and Aleronians to be liars when they said no humans survived. Everybody is worth saving, once it’s known that they were still alive –instead of the original story of an accidental altercation that irradiated the surface.

I feel that I missed a lot of what was going on in this book, as the author decides to tell (not show) or even skip the details of what is happening, while expanding at length on unimportant things. I didn’t find that I gained insight into Heim during the long travels on Staurni, and it barely showed Earth’s drive to stop him –a hastily thrown together mission instead of a manhunt by the navy. Even the title doesn’t make sense, because the book is (barely) about Heim using the Fox II, named after his original command, which was the Star Fox. I was able to pick out some parts that I enjoyed, but I can’t recommend this book, as the writing was difficult, and the story wasn’t very interesting.