Very much enjoyed as a late night read. It was quick without feeling too shallow. While Chalker was progressive for his times, I'm not sure how well his writing has aged for others, without being seen as just a product of 'old-fashioned' progressive thought. Still I loved and recommend it. ( )

This is the first volume of the tetralogy, The Four Lords of the Diamond.

Far future. Human civilization spread over a quarter of our galaxy, forms the Confederacy. Other intelligent races are either integrated or eliminated. And now, for the first time an unknown alien (?) civilization is on equal footing with the humanity. It has the edge, for while it possesses intimate knowledge of the Confederacy, humans know nothing about it. The only link is to the star system with four habitable worlds, which are used as the United colonies / Australia i.e. the place for criminal prisoners and undesirables. The worlds have submicroscopic organism (what you’d call nanobots, but years before the term came into use) that integrates with humans and both restricts and amplifies them.

On the first planet, Lilith, the organism almost immediately destroys any alien and ‘dead’ matter, making the usual technological civilization impossible. In return, some people are able to manipulate them, which leads to feats indistinguishable from magic. The Confederacy sends its best agent in the body of space pirate to investigate the collusion between aliens and criminal lords.
I have read the Russian translation of the book about 20 years ago (the first two volumes, gulped in a few days). I was impressed enough with it to think about this setting and deduce correctly (as I was informed by the one, who read the whole series) how the powers will be shaped on the other worlds. The very fact that it caused me to think about what could have been in other volumes I guess is a nice recommendation, not many books do it.

The style of the book is a bit verbose, with some ‘strange’ sentences for the non-native speaker. Current generation of SF authors write more smoothly and succinctly. Taken as a stand-alone novel it can be assumes a Conan-esque clone, with big burly male protagonist, but it is more than that. Some stuff there is notably less politically correct, in line with the Golden age of SF, where most protagonists were white males and women are often not much more than objects. However, this is just a veneer over the deeper and more interesting story.
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[Update...Dec 2015 - even though I read these just 3.5 years ago, I wanted to end the Year of Nostalgic Re-reads ... well, the calendar year - I expect more of such re-reads next year ... with Chalker. Still great. Still entertaining. Still creative. Still a favorite.]


After slogging through 18 Heinlein novels in the first four months of 2012 (I was stubborn), it was good to get back to decent science fiction. Still imaginative and entertaining after 30 years.

One of my favorite Chalker series. With the Well World sagas and this, he really hit it.
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Having read the paperbacks in highschool, I bought the hardcover omnibus edition in college and I must have read it then, because I KNOW I've read this series at least twice, but I have no record of it after 2000 [which is when I started keeping track of the books I read].

Anyway. This was a nice light, fast, action-oriented scifi novel about aliens, cloning, etc, etc. ( )

Earth took Cal Tremon, stripped away his self, and put the mind and personality of a solar agent into him. Then they sent him on a one-way trip to Lilith. All they had to do was conquer the whole damned planet, execute the Overlord, and report mind-to-mind with the agent he had become but who still remained at home!

Lilith, unfortunately, was one of the four worlds of the Warden Diamond, where a symbiotic bug invaded every living cell -- and from which no infected life could escape and live.

If he failed, Earth wold find a way to kill him. If he should succeed, probably they would kill him for knowing too much. And meantime, naked and a slave, he had to survive -- survive despite the mutated witches and all the feudal hell of a planet gone mad and a people without hope.

I'm a Chalker fan and really enjoyed this book.It was a blend of SF and Fantasy written in first person. ( )