Helix Wars
By Eric Brown

Helix Wars is Eric Brown's followup to his Helix novel, a book I liked a lot. Whilst I would not rate this as quite as highly, it is a very worthy sequel.

Taking place about two hundred years after the first, the human colony has made its home on the Helix and been assigned a "peacekeeper" role by the Helix Builders. When one of the alien races on the Helix decides to wage a war of conquest on another, a human inter-world pilot is shot down and dropped into the midst of the terror and ravages of the war.

What we end up with is a great action and adventure story, with a chase, a rescue attempt, an alien partner, high technology and a brutal foe. Like the first book, Brown is good on the interaction and relationship between people, here alien people. We empathise with the alien point of view completely, and the morality of killing is explored as the characters debate and argue about what sort tactics to use and how justified killing is. It is an excellent science-fiction thriller: easy to read and pacy like the first book.

I will say that I don't particularly like the cover of the paperback I have though. It makes the book look like a video game, or some sort of "role-playing" fiction! Getting past that though, a straightforward action book I enjoyed reading a lot. Now to find the next Brown book to pick up: they are not all in print anymore I think.