haven’t had the pleasure of reading something so changeable since The Gap Cycle series by Stephen R. Donaldson. There, your usual space opera characters are presented in a scene, yet we follow them before and after that moment, finding out what they really are like, our opinions changing as the story develops. It was flowing in an interesting and adjustable narration.

This time, it’s The Tomorrow Testament, a book by Barry Longyear, the second part of The Enemy Papers. This is just a continuation of the war between the Humans and Draks, from the point of view (sic, and you’ll see why) of one Major Joanne Nicole. She’s one of the support troopers on a base, about to be overrun. In this, she finds herself in the muddy trenches – they fend off one attack and then, doomed and helpless, she and her surviving soldiers are forced to surrender to the Drak. Then, while in captivity, a Human raid on their planet ends up blinding her. Now sightless, she ends up being held on the compound of one of the ranking theologians of the Drak (since she saved one of its offspring in the raid that took her sight). And there, she finds herself slowly being drawn into a peace process, gradually working with the Drak to try to bring this horrible war to an end.

And here’s where it gets interesting. When you read this and the first book of the series, Enemy Mine, you begin to understand the Drak’s “Bible”, the Talman.  It has iron-clad rules for all the Drak tribes to follow. But in following them, a tribe faces starvation and extinction. There is a tribal argument, a murder, an evaluation. And now, at long last, it is decided that rules must adapt to circumstances and events. Unlike the bible, which literalists stick to after thousands of years (or worse, cherrypick what parts they will follow), the Talman can now morph and change as circumstances command.

This makes it into more of a guidebook for behavior, and moreso, a method of calculating plans and coming up with paths towards a desired future. Great, right? But what if you decide that the ends justify the means? And so, over the book as we watch Major Nicole grope blindly (sorry) for peace, we also see a species’ guiding holy book be used in ways that are counter to it’s initial conceptions. Good? Bad? Well, reader, that’s for you to decide.

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