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STARSILK by Sydney J. Van Scyoc

STARSILK

By

Pub Date: Sept. 1st, 1984
Publisher: Berkley

The final installment in the YA-ish, featherweight trilogy (Darkchild, 1982; Bluesong, 1983). Long isolated from interstellar contact, planet Brakrath is now being studied by several groups of covetous human-aliens. Therefore, powerful ""barohna"" (witch) Khira organizes an expedition--to restore the balance of knowledge, to discover the fate of message-sender Birnam Rauth (several of his clones wander Brakrath), and to determine the source of the colored alien silks that, when handled, sing songs of their distant homeworld. The latter is inhabited by decorative cat-like intelligent aliens (their doings form a second narrative strand) and by a communal, polymorphous creature, source of the sentient silks. (The creature captured Birnam Rauth 100 years ago and recorded his mentality on one of the silks.) And the Brakrathian explorers--nonentity Reyna (Khira's daughter by a Rauth clone) and hunter Juaren--have little difficulty in discovering all this, communicating with the aliens, and recovering the talking Birnam Rauth silk. Juvenile characters, tiresome interior monologues, a languid pace, and mounds of frothy detail--with no real substance at all.