The Tower and the Hive [Hardcover]

Anne McCaffrey's greatest success is the lengthy "Dragonriders of Pern" science-fantasy sequence that began with the award-winning 1968 Dragonflight. In 1990 The Rowan inaugurated her less well-known "Tower and the Hive" SF series, of which this is the fifth and last. This romantic interstellar soap-opera now stars three generations of extended family, with much pairing-off and discreet sex. Leading characters all have envied Talents like telepathy or teleportation: passengers and cargo are flicked across deep space by human mind-power. The plot is tangled and episodic, major strands being the biological problems of dealing humanely with genocidal "Hiver" aliens defeated in the previous volume and solving the overpopulation problem of humanity's furry allies the Mrdini (who have names like Prtglm and Gktmglnt). Other issues come and go with soap- operatic suddenness, like the promising bad guy who plans revenge for his humiliation and then quietly turns into a good guy instead; or the assassination plot organised by a human xenophobe, which fizzles so quickly that there's no time for the thrill of suspense. The Tower and the Hive is a lightweight SF romp whose substantial back-story and large cast list are best approached through the four earlier books. --David Langford

This fifth book concludes "The Tower and the Hive" series. The children of Damia and Afra Lyon take up new and demanding responsibilities - trying to discover the whereabouts of all the Hiver-occupied worlds.

Concluding her magnificent five-book sequence begun in The Rowan. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Much had been done to limit and destroy the powers of the terrible Hivers, who had torn through space annihilating every living thing that stood in their way. But still the Alliance - of Human and furry Mrdini - had to discover the whereabouts of every last Hiver world and stop the Queens from further colonization.

Of Damia’s children, some were put on the Hiver search, and others, the gifted and valuable T-1 Talents, were worked to the point of exhaustion as planets destroyed by the Hivers were opened up for colonization by the rapidly exploding Mrdini population.

And there was dissent within the Star League Worlds — a growing resentment of the power and privileges of the Talents, most especially the dynasty that stemmed from the Rowan and Damia. As a new Talent, Vagrian, a flawed T-2, was shipped in to help Laria’s

exhausted team, he brought with him tension and antagonism, an outward sign of the trouble fermenting among the Star Worlds.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Anne McCaffrey
Anne McCaffrey is one of the world's leading science-fiction writers, and has won both the Hugo and Nebula awards. Born and raised in the US, although of Irish extraction, she now lives permanently in Ireland, in the heart of the Wicklow Mountains, where, as well as writing, she breeds horses. She has recently been awarded the Margaret A. Edwards' Lifetime Achievement Literary Award. She is the creator of the Dragons of Pern series, currently being filmed for TV.