The fact that I haven’t read the previous books in this series (created by Larry Niven) probably disqualifies me from making intelligent comments on Man-Kzin Wars X: The Wunder War, but I picked it up because Hal Colebatch is an e-mail friend, and a wise and perceptive writer over at the American Spectator (also a lawyer and sometime government functionary in Australia).

Full disclosure: I did not get my copy for free as a reviewer. I sprung for it out of my own money.

The premise of the Man-Kzin Wars series, as I understand it, begins with the assumption that space-traveling cultures are generally peaceful cultures. Warfare is too much of a scientific and economic drain for warlike civilizations to get far in interstellar exploration and commerce.

However, there is an exception—the Kzin, a race of tiger-like (but larger and stronger) bipeds who sweep across the galaxy like Romans on the march, conquering and enslaving (often devouring) peaceful civilizations as they go. When they first approach a human colony, the paradisaical planet called Wunderland, it looks like more of the same. The humans there have put warfare so far behind them that the study of it is next to illegal, and curious scholars are at a loss to understand the functions of weapons, or what military ranks indicate.

But humans are different from other species. When finally pushed into a corner, they quickly re-learn their old skills, and raise a genuine, bloody resistance (which the Kzin rather admire). This part of the saga forms a prequel to the other books in the series, telling a story only alluded to previously. It consists of four novellas, three of which feature a biologist named Nils Rykerman, who becomes a leader of the resistance. The first (and longest) story, One War for Wunderland, tells how the Wunderlanders reluctantly came to realize and respond to the danger they were in, and describes how, in the midst of battle, Rykerman fought to get the woman he loved into an escape ship, believing (correctly) she might have knowledge that could save mankind.

The other stories give us snippets from later history, when the humans have defeated the Kzin, and a grudging alliance begins to take shape. The reader’s own beliefs on justice, forgiveness, and revenge are challenged in these difficult, and sometimes moving, stories.

Hal Colebatch, as an Australian, was an excellent choice to tell the tale of a colony planet where people struggle with the challenges of adapting an old culture to a new setting, as well as the challenge of facing a vicious attack which leaves it to them to defend themselves.

I’ve complained for years that my problem with Science Fiction is that I have found it, generally, rather cold-blooded, the authors treating their characters like lab animals in an experiment. It appears that I should have been reading the despised genre of “Space Opera.” My recent reading in that part of the bookshelf has been very satisfying from an empathetic point of view.

There is a lot of violence here. Bad language? I didn’t actually notice. No explicit sex. Recommended.