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Ally (Wess'har Wars) | 
 enlarge | Author: Karen Traviss
Publisher: Eos
Category: Book
List Price: $7.99
Buy New: $3.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  8 reviews
Sales Rank: 224514
Media: Mass Market Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 400
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.2
Dimensions (in): 6.6 x 4.2 x 1.3
ISBN: 0060882328
Dewey Decimal Number: 813
EAN: 9780060882327
ASIN: 0060882328
Publication Date: April 1, 2007
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Product Description
The worlds orbiting Cavanagh's Star are in turmoil. Civil war on Umeh—ignited by outsiders—threatens to annihilate the teeming masses of a grossly overpopulated planet. On Bezer'ej, the handful of native aquatic creatures who survived extermination must take extraordinary and terrible steps to ensure the future of their kind . . . And the interlopers from a distant planet called Earth can only watch the chaos they helped, in part, to create—knowing their home world will be next to suffer. The day of reckoning is rapidly approaching when the powerful Eqbas will remake the Earth at the expense of its dominant species. And Shan Frankland—once a police officer, once human, now something much more—must decide where her loyalties truly lie: among the gethes, on a planet she once called home, or here, where a dying species presents her with a new and unexpected crisis.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 3 more reviews...
Intriguing and Well Written April 27, 2008
So, why does it only get 4 stars from me? It's something I call the time test. If it takes me more than 2 months to read something, it probably isn't all THAT compelling. This work does indeed cover much of the same ground as the previous books. It's still good, and still very much worth the read. It is not, however, Traviss' best work. I tried to think of the major plot points and couldn't come up with much. It's a lot of waiting and staring down and developing the cultures. The newbies, Skavu, struck me as stereotypically psychopathic, which is unusual for Traviss, who tends to excel at well fleshed out cultures. The two flavors of Wess'har are nicely developed, and she's done a lovely job of pinning down the flaws in humanity. Her descriptions are apt and lively. The language is fluid if a bit crude. If you're not a Karen Traviss fan, shame on you. If you are, you probably already bought the book anyway. If you aren't but plan to be, get cracking reading.
 Covers much the same ground as the previous volume May 30, 2007
17 out of 17 found this review helpful
Ally doesn't live up to the standards set in previous chapters of Karen Traviss' Wess'har Wars. This may be due to padding out an otherwise shorter series to sell more books, or perhaps to overwork. Since the publication of the first two Wess'har novels in 2004, Traviss will have through the end of 2007 published an additional 3 Wess'har novels, plus 5 Star Wars novels - with 3 more novels already scheduled for 2008.
Ally disappoints largely because it doesn't go anywhere, covering much the same ground as in Matriarch, which when it finished left us anticipating the eqbas arrival on Earth. By the end of Ally, they're just packing up.
The title refers to partnerships formed among competing factions to protect common interests, the outcome of Ally's most common activity - talk. Having taken the decision to intervene on Umeh, the eqbas matriarch Esganikan finds herself looking at a decade-long occupation, followed by a potentially equally lengthy assignment to Earth, when she'd most like to go home and start a family. To speed things up and get her off Umeh, she allies herself with a new species, the skavu, ruthless reptile-like bipeds Shan Frankland describes as Eco-Jihadis. The skavu are so fierce and so feared that the Bezer'ej wess'har and the isenj set aside their differences, allowing Esganikan to leave for Earth (skavu in tow) secure that the restructuring of Umeh will be properly managed. What Esganikan doesn't yet know, however, is that the ecological balance on Bezer'ej is once more threatened by c'naatat, which Lindsay Neville has given to the bezeri to save them from extinction. In their own private alliance, Aras and Shan promise not to reveal to Esganikan the c'naatat infection provided Lindsay keeps the super-powered squid from reproducing.
While the plot is rather thin, Ally continues to deliver on character development. Perhaps the most endearing person in this volume is Aras, who struggles courageously with conscience and the need for forgiveness and reconciliation. While observing that a lasting sense of betrayal is characteristically human, he is confounded that Deborah Garrod has been able to forgive him for executing her husband. Perhaps, he thinks, he can do the same for the isenj who tortured him while a prisoner of war. And so he visits Umeh to see if perhaps he can relieve himself of the demons that have tortured him for most of the past five centuries.
Traviss also includes more of her cutting observations on humanity. When Eddie Michallat insults a human as a "stupid cow," his adolescent wess'har companion Giyadas is intrigued by his word choice: "So by comparison with what you think of as an inferior species, you insult her. And you also make her not human, and so not worthy of respect." She's also critical of Eddie's excision from his reports of some of the most brutal images of the war: "When you look at something, you remove all that doesn't affect you. You see what you need and feel, nothing else. You see nobody else." This propensity to demean and ignore other sentient creatures is also found, Aras observes, in the commercialization of animal images, such as plush toy Pandas. "... there are many kinds of human who ... [love] the abstract ideal while abusing and destroying the living object."
And finally Traviss continues to develop the big themes that make this series so compelling - the interdependence life, the insubstantiality of reality, and the ability of the mind to condition itself for good or bad - ideas that dovetailed quite nicely with recent readings on Buddhism. As Aras observes: "There is no such thing as continual improvement. Just change."
Hopefully, the final volume, Judge (April 2008), will be a change for the better.
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 Book Five of the Shan Frankland Saga May 17, 2007
"Ally," is the latest in Karen Traviss's "Shan Frankland" saga, and as with all of the entries in what I suspect will be, when it concludes, one of the finest sf series ever created, it amazes: Amazes because of the number of new ideas on cultures and their effect on their native ecologies that the author tosses out. Amazes because of the thought she's put into the story and the characters. Amazes because, although the action doesn't move very far forward from where things left off in "Matriarch," the author manages to spin out 388 fascinating pages to keep us engrossed while we wait for the long-planned expedition back to Earth, where the alien Eqbas intend to solve the planet's ecological disasters, whether the inhabitants want them to or not.
In this tale, the Eqbas clean up the Isenji planet, Umeh (and they show very tough love indeed as they go about it), aided by their allies, the seriously whackadoo Skavu; the creepy Rayat findds yet another way to become useful, while Linday and the Bezer'ej go through more changes; and of course Ade, Aras, and Shan continue to love and squabble.
In telling the tale the amazingly assured Ms. Frankland makes you rethink, yet again, what you thought you knew. But, hey, she does that in every volume of the series, of which this is the fifth.
Naturally, new readers would be well advised to begin at the beginning, with "City of Pearl," and move on from there.
The thrill ride continues. May 7, 2007
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
Traviss is one of the most interesting SF author writing these days. Ally is a wonderful read, but if you haven't read the earlier books in the series itisn't the place to start.
If you like your SF to come with complex storylines, interesting aliens, multi sided characters and plots that are as fun as a roller coaster ride, and make you stop and think about things in the real world, look up City of Pearl and give this series a try.
It won't disappoint.
Then when you've devoured the Wess'har books and are still hungry for more check out Traviss's Star Wars Republic Commando books Hard Contact (Star Wars: Republic Commando), Triple Zero (Star Wars: Republic Commando). They will change how you think of media tie in books forever.
Seriously.
Review of 'Ally' May 7, 2007
2 out of 5 found this review helpful
This is another great book in a great series. It left me waiting in anticipation for the next one.
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