Items related to Trouble Magnet: A Pip & Flinx Adventure
From science fiction icon Alan Dean Foster comes a blazing new Pip & Flinx adventure for fans of the green-eyed redhead with awesome mental powers and his miniature flying dragon. In this dazzling new novel, Flinx confirms his status as the galaxy’s greatest magnet for big trouble.
Wandering out there in some remote region of the galaxy is a gargantuan sentient Tar-Aiym weapons’ system. All Flinx has to do–while his pals look after his injured love Clarity Held–is find the hefty object and persuade it to knock out the monstrous evil that is hurtling through space to waste the entire Commonwealth.
A no-brainer, really, especially for Flinx, who is never without his loyal entourage of official snoops, crazed zealots, assorted goons, and the occasional assassin. Indeed, the boy wonder and his mini-drag, Pip, are eager to commence their heroic task . . . just as soon as Flinx visits Visaria–a dangerously depraved planet–to convince himself that humans are indeed worth saving.
The chances of stumbling across high moral values and utopian ideals don’t look promising–what with Flinx playing a lawless Pied Piper to a gang of lying, thieving juvenile delinquents. But prospects really go south when Flinx runs afoul of the corrupt planet’s ruthless crime king.
Still, life is full of surprises, and Flinx is about to get smacked by a passel of them–by turns devastating, heartening, and positively jaw-dropping. For although Flinx came to Visaria to plumb the enigma of humankind, there’s another mystery waiting here, a shocking clue about his own shadowy past.
Wandering out there in some remote region of the galaxy is a gargantuan sentient Tar-Aiym weapons’ system. All Flinx has to do–while his pals look after his injured love Clarity Held–is find the hefty object and persuade it to knock out the monstrous evil that is hurtling through space to waste the entire Commonwealth.
A no-brainer, really, especially for Flinx, who is never without his loyal entourage of official snoops, crazed zealots, assorted goons, and the occasional assassin. Indeed, the boy wonder and his mini-drag, Pip, are eager to commence their heroic task . . . just as soon as Flinx visits Visaria–a dangerously depraved planet–to convince himself that humans are indeed worth saving.
The chances of stumbling across high moral values and utopian ideals don’t look promising–what with Flinx playing a lawless Pied Piper to a gang of lying, thieving juvenile delinquents. But prospects really go south when Flinx runs afoul of the corrupt planet’s ruthless crime king.
Still, life is full of surprises, and Flinx is about to get smacked by a passel of them–by turns devastating, heartening, and positively jaw-dropping. For although Flinx came to Visaria to plumb the enigma of humankind, there’s another mystery waiting here, a shocking clue about his own shadowy past.
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
About the Author:
Alan Dean Foster has written in a variety of genres, including hard science fiction, fantasy, horror, detective, western, historical, and contemporary fiction. He is the author of the New York Times bestseller Star Wars: The Approaching Storm and the popular Pip & Flinx novels, as well as novelizations of several films including Star Wars, the first three Alien films, and Alien Nation. His novel Cyber Way won the Southwest Book Award for Fiction in 1990, the first science fiction work ever to do so. Foster and his wife, JoAnn Oxley, live in Prescott, Arizona, in a house built of brick that was salvaged from an early-twentieth-century miners’ brothel. He is currently at work on several new novels and media projects.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:
Chapter 1
A most peculiar thing happened to the battleship as it departed the Repler system: initially daunting in size and form, it proceeded to undergo a kind of reverse metamorphosis, as if a butterfly were turning backward into an ungainly caterpillar. Intimidating weapons blisters collapsed in upon themselves like so many glistening, harmless bubbles. Lethal wave-form projectors shrank and slivered. Vast projecting appurtenances shimmied and vanished like the ominous illusions they were, until the menacing martial shape had imploded completely. In its place gleamed the far smaller fast-moving footprint of an ordinary cargo carrier approaching changeover. Clearly not a craft that was part of the impressive fleet component still orbiting the planet that was rapidly receding behind it, nor one that was likely to attract undue notice.
Visually revamped, externally overhauled, and mechanically face-lifted determinedly downscale, the Teacher slipped unchallenged into the physically unreasonable but mathematically coherent state known colloquially as space-plus, whereupon it swiftly left the Commonwealth border system known as Repler not only far behind, but far beyond it.
“Changeover complete. Exterior appearance modified as per necessity. Proceeding on general Almaggee vector. Awaiting instructions.” A pause, then, “Resume search?”
Resume search. Flinx stared out the command port at the splay of distorted stars forward. Resume search for what? His ship was doubtless referring to the search his friends and mentors Bran Tse-Mallory and the Eint Truzenzuzex had sent him on. The one he had agreed to undertake provided only that they see to and look after his injured love Clarity Held back on New Riviera. A simple enough quest request.
All he was being asked to do was search and scour the vast reaches of the largely uninhabited section of the Sagittarius Arm of the galaxy opposite the Commonwealth, locate and establish contact with an unbelievably ancient planet-sized weapons platform of the long-extinct—except for one recently demised individual—war-like species called the Tar-Aiym, and persuade it to aid in defending all civilization against an immense, undefined menace steadily accelerating in this direction from a region of space near Boötes known as the Great Emptiness. And do this while avoiding the attentions of the increasingly persistent and curious Commonwealth authorities, the crazed suicidal adherents of the Order of Null who badly wanted him dead, certain elements of the AAnn Empire, and perhaps the isolated Qwarm assassin. All in hopes of saving the galaxy and, with luck, of in a few years making it to his thirtieth birthday. And maybe, just maybe, finding out who his father was.
He took a deep breath. From her position sprawled across the center of the command console, the minidrag Pip looked up at him, yawned, and stretched her brilliant pink-and-blue wings without unfurling them. He nodded, though not particularly at her.
Time for tea.
The Teacher brewed perfect tea. Many was the time, and more frequently lately than not, he found himself considering perfection tedious. But not when it came to the making of tea. Darjeeling tea from Terra, anar tea from Rhyinpine, unique forest teas from Alaspin; the ship was steeped in those and more. Various chemicals both natural and synthetic for calming the mind and easing the body were available to the Teacher. Except on rare occasions he disdained them all in favor of flavor in the form of natural tea.
When it was delivered to him in a pot and cup whose functions, if not the material from which they had been made, would have been recognizable to a tea drinker from a thousand years ago, he stirred in additives, leaned back, and wondered at how many ancient ship captains had similarly sat and sipped their own favored libation while studying the stars. They had done so from a considerably different perspective, of course. They had been sailing along beneath the stars, not among them.
The hot, sweetened, dark gold liquid calmed his body but did little to settle his thoughts. Behind him lay the threat of the alien Vom, extinguished. Ahead lay a search for something to help deal with an infinitely greater threat. A search that might well take years. To what end? Not for the first time he wondered why he ought to bother. What about his own personal priorities? What about the future for himself and Clarity he dared to dream of in quiet moments? If the evil he had perceived within the Great Emptiness was not due to arrive for hundreds or even thousands of years, why should he care about it? Why should he have to be the one to sacrifice his life and happiness in a probably futile attempt to forestall the inevitable?
Everything went in cycles. Perhaps the eventual arrival of the Great Evil represented nothing more than the ending of one such cycle and the beginning of another. Neither of which, as he lived out his normal life span, he need be expected to deal with.
Still running away, he told himself as he sipped. The realization burned him more than the hot liquid.
After what he’d seen on Repler, the wild thought occurred to him that maybe he should take drugs to make himself feel better. Perhaps try something stronger than tea. Given his singular abilities, however, there was no telling, no way of predicting, what the cost of such an action might be. While he felt he could deal with any consequences that the sampling of artificial stimulants might pose to himself, there was no telling what kind of harm such an indulgence involving his increasingly unmanageable abilities might visit on those around him. He decided that such experimentation was, at least for now, not a viable option.
All right then, the voice inside himself demanded. If you’re going to devote yourself to saving something, maybe what you need to stiffen your resolve is to prove to yourself that that something is worth saving. That it’s worth the sacrifice. What he had recently experienced and observed while on Repler was not encouraging. Selfishness, greed, violence. Conscious misuse of intelligence. Willful consumption of sentience-altering drugs. Bloodhype. The noblest creature he had encountered during his sojourn on Repler—the one with whom he had personally empathized the most—had belonged not to one of the existing races whose future he was being asked to help save but to a Tar-Aiym named Peot: the last surviving representative of that long-dead, war-like species.
On the other hand, despite his recent, self-challenging, near-defiant, and very brief dalliance with the United Church officer Kitten Kai-sung, there was Clarity. Not to mention Bran Tse-Mallory, Truzenzuzex, Mother Mastiff, and other exemplary examples of contemporary cognizance and compassion. Even those who hungered first and foremost for wealth, like the old prospector Knigta Yakus, were at heart good folk whose heritable lines were deserving of preservation.
Maybe that was it, he told himself as he sat up straighter in the command chair. In the course of his short but very full life, so many of those he had been in close contact with had been in one way or another exceptional or atypical. Easy enough to rationalize risking all to save such. But what about the great, restless, surging mass of others? Did they deserve salvation? Was the future of those vast, unknown, swarming genetic masses worth the sacrifice of his personal happiness? That was really what was at stake. That was truly what he needed to decide.
He had told the now deceased Peot that he needed to acquire wisdom. Where to go and what to do to find it? In his short life he had seen much. Love, hate, all manner of planetary environments. But not, his recent encounter on Repler with the disreputable drugger and emoman Dominic Rose notwithstanding, the full wickedness and inventive iniquity of which humankind and others were capable. In order to pass judgment on his fellow sentients, and to acquire the fullness of wisdom that he sought, it was only reasonable to believe that he needed to experience that as well. Needed to proceed counter to his natural impulses and immerse himself in the worst that full-blown civilization had to offer.
He mentally and methodically worked his way through the most relevant steller schematics. The source for the kind of learning he desired lay a good way distant but not all that far off his present vector. Determination overrode a hesitancy that as recently as several years ago would have held him back from proceeding. Determination, and a seriously advanced case of what-the-hell.
Sensing his change of mood, Pip spread her wings, rose, and glided over to land on his right shoulder. As her tail end curled affectionately around his neck, he reached up with his free hand to absently stroke the smooth, scaly back of her head.
“Course change,” he announced aloud, lowering his cup. “We will remain within the borders of the Commonwealth, but off the Almaggee vector. Set a course for Visaria.”
The Teacher’s ship-mind was programmed to emulate an extensive and varied assortment of human reactions, but pausing for emphasis was not one of them. Therefore, its skepticism was immediate.
“Permit me to point out that Visaria represents a considerable detour from the most direct route into the Blight, the region you wish to search for signs of the absented Tar-Aiym artifact.”
He glanced toward one of the numerous visual pickups that were scattered about the command chamber. “Yep.”
Nonexistent applicable programming notwithstanding, the ship-mind momentarily did...
A most peculiar thing happened to the battleship as it departed the Repler system: initially daunting in size and form, it proceeded to undergo a kind of reverse metamorphosis, as if a butterfly were turning backward into an ungainly caterpillar. Intimidating weapons blisters collapsed in upon themselves like so many glistening, harmless bubbles. Lethal wave-form projectors shrank and slivered. Vast projecting appurtenances shimmied and vanished like the ominous illusions they were, until the menacing martial shape had imploded completely. In its place gleamed the far smaller fast-moving footprint of an ordinary cargo carrier approaching changeover. Clearly not a craft that was part of the impressive fleet component still orbiting the planet that was rapidly receding behind it, nor one that was likely to attract undue notice.
Visually revamped, externally overhauled, and mechanically face-lifted determinedly downscale, the Teacher slipped unchallenged into the physically unreasonable but mathematically coherent state known colloquially as space-plus, whereupon it swiftly left the Commonwealth border system known as Repler not only far behind, but far beyond it.
“Changeover complete. Exterior appearance modified as per necessity. Proceeding on general Almaggee vector. Awaiting instructions.” A pause, then, “Resume search?”
Resume search. Flinx stared out the command port at the splay of distorted stars forward. Resume search for what? His ship was doubtless referring to the search his friends and mentors Bran Tse-Mallory and the Eint Truzenzuzex had sent him on. The one he had agreed to undertake provided only that they see to and look after his injured love Clarity Held back on New Riviera. A simple enough quest request.
All he was being asked to do was search and scour the vast reaches of the largely uninhabited section of the Sagittarius Arm of the galaxy opposite the Commonwealth, locate and establish contact with an unbelievably ancient planet-sized weapons platform of the long-extinct—except for one recently demised individual—war-like species called the Tar-Aiym, and persuade it to aid in defending all civilization against an immense, undefined menace steadily accelerating in this direction from a region of space near Boötes known as the Great Emptiness. And do this while avoiding the attentions of the increasingly persistent and curious Commonwealth authorities, the crazed suicidal adherents of the Order of Null who badly wanted him dead, certain elements of the AAnn Empire, and perhaps the isolated Qwarm assassin. All in hopes of saving the galaxy and, with luck, of in a few years making it to his thirtieth birthday. And maybe, just maybe, finding out who his father was.
He took a deep breath. From her position sprawled across the center of the command console, the minidrag Pip looked up at him, yawned, and stretched her brilliant pink-and-blue wings without unfurling them. He nodded, though not particularly at her.
Time for tea.
The Teacher brewed perfect tea. Many was the time, and more frequently lately than not, he found himself considering perfection tedious. But not when it came to the making of tea. Darjeeling tea from Terra, anar tea from Rhyinpine, unique forest teas from Alaspin; the ship was steeped in those and more. Various chemicals both natural and synthetic for calming the mind and easing the body were available to the Teacher. Except on rare occasions he disdained them all in favor of flavor in the form of natural tea.
When it was delivered to him in a pot and cup whose functions, if not the material from which they had been made, would have been recognizable to a tea drinker from a thousand years ago, he stirred in additives, leaned back, and wondered at how many ancient ship captains had similarly sat and sipped their own favored libation while studying the stars. They had done so from a considerably different perspective, of course. They had been sailing along beneath the stars, not among them.
The hot, sweetened, dark gold liquid calmed his body but did little to settle his thoughts. Behind him lay the threat of the alien Vom, extinguished. Ahead lay a search for something to help deal with an infinitely greater threat. A search that might well take years. To what end? Not for the first time he wondered why he ought to bother. What about his own personal priorities? What about the future for himself and Clarity he dared to dream of in quiet moments? If the evil he had perceived within the Great Emptiness was not due to arrive for hundreds or even thousands of years, why should he care about it? Why should he have to be the one to sacrifice his life and happiness in a probably futile attempt to forestall the inevitable?
Everything went in cycles. Perhaps the eventual arrival of the Great Evil represented nothing more than the ending of one such cycle and the beginning of another. Neither of which, as he lived out his normal life span, he need be expected to deal with.
Still running away, he told himself as he sipped. The realization burned him more than the hot liquid.
After what he’d seen on Repler, the wild thought occurred to him that maybe he should take drugs to make himself feel better. Perhaps try something stronger than tea. Given his singular abilities, however, there was no telling, no way of predicting, what the cost of such an action might be. While he felt he could deal with any consequences that the sampling of artificial stimulants might pose to himself, there was no telling what kind of harm such an indulgence involving his increasingly unmanageable abilities might visit on those around him. He decided that such experimentation was, at least for now, not a viable option.
All right then, the voice inside himself demanded. If you’re going to devote yourself to saving something, maybe what you need to stiffen your resolve is to prove to yourself that that something is worth saving. That it’s worth the sacrifice. What he had recently experienced and observed while on Repler was not encouraging. Selfishness, greed, violence. Conscious misuse of intelligence. Willful consumption of sentience-altering drugs. Bloodhype. The noblest creature he had encountered during his sojourn on Repler—the one with whom he had personally empathized the most—had belonged not to one of the existing races whose future he was being asked to help save but to a Tar-Aiym named Peot: the last surviving representative of that long-dead, war-like species.
On the other hand, despite his recent, self-challenging, near-defiant, and very brief dalliance with the United Church officer Kitten Kai-sung, there was Clarity. Not to mention Bran Tse-Mallory, Truzenzuzex, Mother Mastiff, and other exemplary examples of contemporary cognizance and compassion. Even those who hungered first and foremost for wealth, like the old prospector Knigta Yakus, were at heart good folk whose heritable lines were deserving of preservation.
Maybe that was it, he told himself as he sat up straighter in the command chair. In the course of his short but very full life, so many of those he had been in close contact with had been in one way or another exceptional or atypical. Easy enough to rationalize risking all to save such. But what about the great, restless, surging mass of others? Did they deserve salvation? Was the future of those vast, unknown, swarming genetic masses worth the sacrifice of his personal happiness? That was really what was at stake. That was truly what he needed to decide.
He had told the now deceased Peot that he needed to acquire wisdom. Where to go and what to do to find it? In his short life he had seen much. Love, hate, all manner of planetary environments. But not, his recent encounter on Repler with the disreputable drugger and emoman Dominic Rose notwithstanding, the full wickedness and inventive iniquity of which humankind and others were capable. In order to pass judgment on his fellow sentients, and to acquire the fullness of wisdom that he sought, it was only reasonable to believe that he needed to experience that as well. Needed to proceed counter to his natural impulses and immerse himself in the worst that full-blown civilization had to offer.
He mentally and methodically worked his way through the most relevant steller schematics. The source for the kind of learning he desired lay a good way distant but not all that far off his present vector. Determination overrode a hesitancy that as recently as several years ago would have held him back from proceeding. Determination, and a seriously advanced case of what-the-hell.
Sensing his change of mood, Pip spread her wings, rose, and glided over to land on his right shoulder. As her tail end curled affectionately around his neck, he reached up with his free hand to absently stroke the smooth, scaly back of her head.
“Course change,” he announced aloud, lowering his cup. “We will remain within the borders of the Commonwealth, but off the Almaggee vector. Set a course for Visaria.”
The Teacher’s ship-mind was programmed to emulate an extensive and varied assortment of human reactions, but pausing for emphasis was not one of them. Therefore, its skepticism was immediate.
“Permit me to point out that Visaria represents a considerable detour from the most direct route into the Blight, the region you wish to search for signs of the absented Tar-Aiym artifact.”
He glanced toward one of the numerous visual pickups that were scattered about the command chamber. “Yep.”
Nonexistent applicable programming notwithstanding, the ship-mind momentarily did...
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- PublisherDel Rey
- Publication date2006
- ISBN 10 0345485041
- ISBN 13 9780345485045
- BindingHardcover
- Edition number1
- Number of pages288
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