Outlaw Planet

A brilliant, very well-constructed story that takes place in the same universe as the books in the Pandominion duology. The Step technology that is explained in those books is used very briefly here to facilitate a story that spans over a thousand years.

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Like in the books of the Pandominion series, humans are the minority in a world where several different clades of mammals have become sentient, walk on two legs, wear clothes, and carry guns.

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William came from a big litter himself and had inherited only two things from his own father – the family name and an optimism so fervent it amounted to a religious creed. The name was sufficient collateral for a number of sizeable loans, and the optimism shielded William from any contaminating shred of caution or foresight.

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This story starts with an introduction to the heroin of the story, Dog-bitch Bess, and the environment where the story takes place. Dog-bitch Bess is a former school teacher turned gunslinger, and the environment is a land mass divided politically and socially that periodically goes to war with each other.

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The north is called the Parity where all sentient beings are considered equal. The south, called the Echelon, considers some clades, like gophers and squirrels, lesser and therefore they’re used as slaves. Dotted along the continent are huge white towers that nobody knows the purpose of.

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In the second chapter, the story gains context when some soldiers of the True Imperium step into this world and soldiers from Pandominion follow them. Normally, stepping takes a person from a location on the planet to the exact same location on another version of the same planet with no time lapse.

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Southern found that the feelings he could no longer access in relation to his own life came easily and strongly when he was immersed in a story. A doomed romance could make him cry. A tale of frontier skirmishes could thrill and exercise him to the point where he almost pissed himself.

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When the Pandominium soldiers step through to chase the True Imps, they understand that the platform has been tampered with because they have stepped into the world a hundred years after the soldiers they were chasing arrived.

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One of the things the Pandominion soldiers discover is what the towers are actually doing. Before the last of the soldiers could bring them down he died, but before he did, he managed to distill the wisdom of his mission in a way that would allow it to continue with his descendants.

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Sometimes we get what we wish for, and sometimes that’s what ruins us. But then on other occasions we’re apt to take up arms against our own good fortune as if to prove we’re not deserving of it. Martha and Bessie’s relationship had its share of both these entanglements, but there’s nothing unusual in that. It’s just the common run of things.

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Those descendants get caught up with Dog-bitch Bess and there are plenty of gun battles and high-speed chases on giant beetles.

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This story is not only about genetic engineering, it’s also about loss, the deep, respectful relationship that can form between a person and an AI, and one man’s tremendous effort to liberate the inhabitants of a planet so they are free to make their own choices.

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