Conference noted::sf

1092.0. "Ansen Dibell" by TECRUS::REDFORD () Wed Aug 05 1992 18:18

    Does anyone know anything about this author?  I was digging
    through my collection a few days ago and came across several of
    his/her novels.  The books were "The Pursuit of the Screamer",
    "Circle, Crescent, Star", and "Summerfair".  They had some
    interesting ideas and some really striking characterization, so I
    was wondering what else he/she had written.
    
    All three books are part of a series set on a lost colony world. 
    The civilization of the original settlers, the Teks, has
    fallen, leaving things at a feudal level.  The settlers were
    immortals, maintaining themselves through mind recordings and
    cloned bodies.  The clone machinery is still running, but their
    present situation has driven all of the Teks to despair and
    madness.   
    
    For their own amusement, the Teks had genetically engineered the
    aboriginal race of the planet, the Valde, to be able to cross-breed with
    humans.  The Valde are empaths, and can sense the emotions of all
    creatures around them.  Human women with Valde blood have a
    diluted version of this talent called Truthtell, which lets them 
    sense when someone is lying. Human men resent this.  A system of
    matriarchies has sprung up with towns run by women with Truthtell
    and defended by troops of Valde.  
    
    The protagonist, Jannus, grew up as a boy in such a town.  He
    befriends one of the last Teks, and falls in the love with a
    Valde, Poli, in the first book.   Their romance, their
    adventures, and their conflicts for and against the Shai, the
    slave and master of the Teks, form the plots of the other two books.
    
    It's rare in an SF book to find characters purely identifiable by
    their speech, but Dibell can do it.  These three books came out as DAW
    paperbacks in the early Eighties, and I understand that there are
    two more books in the series.  Does anyone know the titles?
    
    /jlr