Hunter's Run

George R. R. Martin, Gardner Dozois and Daniel Abraham

Average Rating 7/10 (1 Review)

In a fight outside a bar Ramon Espejo kills a man. Next day, all hell breaks loose. The dead man was a big shot, a diplomat on a mission to the out-world of Sao Paulo. Ramon goes on the run, heading north toward unexplored territory, land so far only glimpsed from orbit during the first colony surveys.

Ramon has gone from being nothing in the hills of Mexico to being nothing on Sao Paulo. He makes a bare living prospecting for minerals. Maybe God meant him to be poor, or he wouldn't have made him so mean. He can't even remember why he killed the European, only the drinking, and the rage that followed.

Better to be alone in the wild landscape... off the map, beyond law and civilisation. Each trip out he's sure will be the big one that'll make him rich. This one, too.

Instead he finds something else, something terrifying. Or rather, it finds him, and uses him: as humans are used by species more intelligent than themselves. But Ramon Espejo is about to prove what a man is capable of. Ramon is about to demonstrate what it is to be human; to be angry, intelligent and alive. And he is about to discover his function in the broad flow of the universe. And why it was he killed the diplomat in the first place...

From a dream-team of writers comes a powerful tale of betrayal, trickery and sheer human grit. Hunter's Run is surely destined to join the great classics of modern imaginative fiction.

Review by Chrissi (281007) Rating (7/10)

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Review by Chrissi
Rating 7/10
Hunter's Run is a collaboration between the three authors which, from inception to print took about 30 years. It started as a novella, and after the writer stalled, it was passed to the next, although it would have seemed to have spent a lot of time in a drawer while the authors waited for inspiration.

There are a couple of interesting premises in the story, which I will point out is proper science fiction -I agreed to read this having read George R. R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire and blithely assumed that it would be a fantasy... I was mistaken, but in spite of not being a great fan of science fiction (the enthusiasm for the details which make new technologies work escapes me) I did find the human story accessible. I found it reasonably engaging once I gave up trying to like the protagonist who, to put it bluntly, is not a nice man.

Ramon is a hard-drinking, violent prospector on a planet similar to earth. He is in a fight in a bar and he stabs a man who then dies. Unfortunately for Ramon the man is much more important than he is and he has to leave town for uncharted territory before someone remembers or can prove that he was involved in the sorry mess.

There are some interesting points made in this book, the main one being about alien life; if and when we meet beings from elsewhere in the universe, will there be any commonality. Not just communication, but will we have any shared concepts. The aliens who capture Ramon do not relate to laughter as it makes no direct contribution to meeting human needs. Ramon tries to explain otherwise and is accused of being perverse, and so punished.

Books such as this are not something which I would normally read and I found this heavy going in the beginning. It is not until Ramon is a captive forced by the alien with him to act as a hunting tool that he starts to become aware that things are not quite right and wonders what really has happened to him. Unfortunately, I found that there was nothing mind-altering or ground breaking for me; the main themes have been explored by other authors, but the central idea of an alien race using a man to catch another man was unexpected. This allowed the exploration of these more familiar principles, including a man's experience of his reality - how can anyone be sure that anything is real, is generally a drunken conversation about perception. It was for me, though, a difficult read; I wanted Ramon to change, to become a better person, but it did not really happen...
Chrissi (28th October 2007)