he Last Enemy is the third book in The Enemy Papers trilogy. You’ll remember that I reviewed the first two, Enemy Mine and The Tomorrow Testament down those links. The entire body of work forms the Human-Drak war. And by the end of the second book, we learn that another alien race (smaller and sneakier) set us up on a collision course for the major powerhouses on the planet Amadeen. There, like the West Bank and Northern Ireland, the war has become splinted and hateful, with groups fighting in the memories of old atrocities. It is so hopeless that thirty years ago (at the end of the second book) the Humans and Draks just signed a peace accord, which included simply placing the planet in quarantine and just allowing them fight it out.

So the book opens with a Drak deep in the fighting. He eventually makes his way to a monk of sorts, high in the mountains, and is seen by this monk as being instrumental in securing peace for this hopeless planet. Smuggled offworld, he makes his way to Friendship, a planet deep in Drak space, where (it seems) the first book took place, the hero of which, Willis Davidge, resides.

Now, to explain the process they use to discover who is behind the ongoing war, who benefits, and ultimately, how to stop it falls into the philosophies of the first two books – you’ll need to read them to understand the method they finally use to resolve the endless conflict. And I’ll give the author this – it was a fair resolution.

So, A good book by Barry Longyear, worth picking up (if only online, given how shitty and cramped scifi is on shelves these days). Great read.

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