Francine Mezo

(Original Review, 1980-11-25)

When you see a pb cover with the author's name in bright red letters over an inch high, and the title letters in white, only a quarter of an inch in height, but you never heard of the writer, it makes you wonder. (The story doesn't read like a translation, nor is there any entry for Mezo in Clute's SF ENCYCLOPEDIA, so this is seemingly not an import.) It looked like something for my SF female protagonists’ collection, so I got it despite one of the most ridiculous cover pictures for that type. It's a fairly straightforward galactic-war story, the first of 2 or more in a series. It's flawed by what I suspect was excessive editorial deletion of background data. Particularly in the big space battle at the end where you're not quite sure what all those maneuvers are, what they accomplish, or how. Yet, there was still something distinctly intriguing about the story. Partly it may have been the groups of identical clones with conditioned restrictions akin to Asimov's "Laws of Robotic". Or perhaps it was the clone-protagonist's development toward a sense of being a human person despite those inbred restrictions. The ending is a downer, but with a sharp coruscation of hope.
My/ hope is that UNLESS SHE BURN, "coming soon by this author" is the sequel, and really does come soon. Unaccustomedly, I ended up really caring about that heroine.

[2018 EDIT: This review was written at the time as I was running my own personal BBS server. Much of the language of this and other reviews written in 1980 reflect a very particular kind of language: what I call now in retrospect a “BBS language”.]… (meer)