Conference noted::sf

483.0. "Tuf Voyaging" by NULL::REDFORD (It's turtles all the way down) Mon Jun 08 1987 22:37

George R. R. Martin
Baen Books 1987

Haviland Tuf is not doing well as a small-time interstellar trader.
Although scrupulously honest and fair in all his dealings, people 
are put off by his enormous height and girth, and his 
corpse-white, expressionless face.  He and his ship, "The Cornucopia 
of Excellent Goods at Low Prices" have fallen on hard times, so he
is forced to accept an offer by a rather shady group to look for a 
fabulous treasure, a seedship of long-vanished Ecological Engineering 
Corps.  

The ship was a weapon in an ancient war, a weapon of enormous potency.
Its databases and cloning tanks can reconstruct and improve upon any 
of the millions of lifeforms in known space, everything from the 
Tyranosaurus Rex of Earth to the hooded dracula of Vilkakis.  With a 
seedship one could inflict anything on an enemy from the selective destructive
of crops to rapid, pustulent death by plague.  The other ships were all
destroyed in the war, but this one was lost in a remote area when its 
crew succumbed to a counter-plague.  Tuf's companions on 
the expedition come to disturbing deaths (although not of his doing).
He becomes the master of the seedship, and the last remaining ecological 
engineer. 

The book is a collection of stories about Tuf and his exploits.  He's 
an eccentric kind of hero: dispassionate, formal, with a love of cats 
and mushroom cuisine.  As you go through the book, however, you 
realize that almost no one else could be entrusted with the literally 
god-like power of the seedship.  With the ship one can raise the dead 
(clone a new creature from the tissue of the old), turn the seas to 
blood (with the red-tide algae), or make manna fall from the sky 
(grains crossed with hydrogen-buoyed plants).  Who could handle such 
responsibility? Certainly not the ineffectual scholars who discover 
the ship, or the mercenaries who take advantage of them.  Not the 
beleaguered colonists faced with biological catastrophes they don't 
understand, or even the hard-bitten spaceport master who only wants 
to save her world from its own over-breeding.  It takes a certain 
lack of sympathy to be a god, a lack of desire to do too much good.
The stories are nice little parables of power, and page-turning 
adventures to boot.

/jlr