SHADOW HUNTER

Baker (the story collection What A Piece of Work, 1992, etc.) here weighs in with a hefty but hollow saga of a world in crisis- -with Homo sapiens opposed by virtually every living organism on the planet in a desperate bid for survival. Triggering the final showdown in the year 2131 is the disappearance of teenager Ronnie Draper, lost to civilization while on a hunting expedition meant to render him fit to be a leader like his father. Captured by a scouting party of Ginks, supposedly degenerate humans who occupy wastelands produced by a previous nuclear war—and who are the ultimate game for hunters in Ronnie's society—he quickly learns that they have unimagined powers and organizational skills. Burrow dwellers and cannibals, they draw strength from a union with their shadow selves that enables them to communicate with other creatures. Ronnie becomes one of them after tasting human flesh, while his case becomes a political football back home, prompting top-secret probes to locate and terminate him, plus an all-out assault on the Ginks. High-tech human warfare meets its match in a well-orchestrated resistance by Nature, as Ronnie finds himself heir apparent to the Ginks's wizened spiritual leader and meets his mate—an all-powerful renegade female captured as a child by Ronnie's own people and sent out now with agents to find him. He comes home alive with her, thereby creating the possibility of racial harmony in a newly configured political climate. Sweeping and imaginative, although this promises more than it delivers: a futuristic vision so vast that characters seem lost, with more shadow than substance.