Action & Adventure, thy name is Caine! If you like your SF with action, adventure, and mondo gratuitous bloodletting (and you don’t mind reading some very colorful swear words), then I highly recommend that Matthew Stover’s Caine Black Knife. Though it’s Stover’s third novel featuring Caine (the first two being Heroes Die and Blade of Tyshalle) and I also recommend reading the first two, Caine Black Knife stands on its own as an excellent book. Jonathan Fist, Dominic Shade, the Prince of Chaos, Caine - whatever you want to call him, in any incarnation the hero of Stover’s series is bad to the bone.

One blurb on the book’s back cover written by Christopher Rowley, the author the Bazil Broketail series, compares Stover to Philip K. Dick. For fans of Philip K. Dick’s writing, like myself, this is high praise. Having read both, I think Stover’s novels are superior - much more action-packed than Dick’s, very quotable, and likely won’t become dated as many of Dick’s have since they don’t refer to specific Earth dates and events. It does have strong language in it, but it fits Caine’s character. He revels in violence and being bad, but only against people who cross or hurt him or his friends or relatives, like Orbek, an ogrillo (an intelligent gorilla/razorback being) who has adopted him into his Black Knife clan. Caine’s attempts to save Orbek’s life and free him from the Khyrillian Knights’ Pits is one of the driving forces of one of the novel’s two plotlines.

One plot thread explores Caine’s origins in sections titled “Then.” We learn of his origins, his desire to become an Actor in a reality show recorded on cubes, wanting to be the star of his life-and-death adventure instead of a bit player. He takes over the story, convincing the others with him to fight the ogrillos instead of trying to flee, and they become surrounded and trapped in the ruins of a vertical city by the Black Knives. Fighting to the death seems preferable to being hunted down, captured, and tortured, so that’s what Caine suggests to Marade, Tizarre, Rababal, Stalton, and Pretornio - especially after Caine lets them know what the Black Knives do to people they suspect of being magic users. Caine tells Marade and the others,

“They call it the Black Knife Kiss: they lock lips onto your eye sockets and suck your eyeballs out. One at a time. Bite through your optic nerve. They figure if you can’t see, you can’t do magic.”

Orbek has to either fight the Champion of the Khyrillians to the death - a fight he has no possibility of winning on his own - or publically apologize to her in the arena and back down, which is to him worse than death. His wife, or “bitch” as the female ogrillos are called in the novel, wants him to fight and won’t have anything to do with him if he refuses. Saving Orbek is a major challenge for Caine, involving him violently in the politics and religion of Boedecken and the Knights.

Caine Black Knife is one of the best SF novels I’ve read in a long time. Stover has written what’s probably the best book of the series so far. The next (and concluding) novel will be called Act of Atonement: Book Two. If it’s at all as good as this one, it promises to be an exciting read. I know I am definitely looking forward to reading it.

• Blade of Tyshalle
• Heroes Die