For Love of Mother-Not [Hardcover] -

Alan Dean Foster

Severn House Pub Ltd

1993

256 páginas

8h 32m

ISBN-10: 0727844032

"For Love of Mother-Not" is the first book in the Pip and Flinx series, although actually the fourth published. As the first novel chronologically it introduces us to Philip Lynx (Flinx) as a young boy, who at the beginning of the novel is bought at a slave auction by elderly Mother Mastiff on the planet Moth. He is a quiet boy who has clearly experienced a lot, not all of it good. His journey to Moth is a confused mixture of memories, his mother and father unknown to him.

Living with Mother Mastiff, they discover by accident that Flinx has a Talent – empathy, the ability to feel other people’s emotions. This saves Mother Mastiff from a theft, where the thief has swallowed the trinkets. They decide to keep the talent a secret.

Flinx finds himself adopted by Pip, a flying Alaspinian miniature dragon (rather like a flying snake, but one which, when threatened, can spit corrosive toxins.) They develop a symbiotic relationship, as Pip is found to be empathic – telepathic on the emotional level – which seems to be advantageous when combined with Flinx’s own Talent.

When Mother Mastiff suddenly disappears, Flinx is left to fend for himself and also to find his foster-mother. He finds that Mastiff may have been snatched by the Meliorare Society, a renegade scientific group whose eugenic programme may be a connection between Flinx and his mysterious past.

With Pip, Flinx sets off to find Mother Mastiff, and, if kidnapped, save her from her captors.

The second half is more about the nature of the Meliorare Society who fit that trope of ‘misunderstood evil scientists’ admirably. They’re not baddies that you want to boo and hiss at, but it is pretty clear where the sympathies of the reader should lie. The main event of the story is straight out of the cowboy stories, albeit on a larger scale. The inclusion of an older woman, a tracker named Lauren Walder, helps get around that issue of a professed urbanite finding his way in the outdoors woods and gives Flinx his first chaste flirtation....
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