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| Cover art by Robert Hunt |
| FLINX'S FOLLY Alan Dean Foster New York: Del Rey Books, November 2003 | Rating: 4.5 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-0-345-45038-8 | ||||
| ISBN-10 0-345-45038-8 | 268pp. | HC | $24.95 | |
This tale opens with Flinx being treated in Reides Central hospital on Goldin IV, where he was taken after suddenly collapsing at a shopping mall in the city — along with 22 others. The examination discloses no obvious cause, but some very puzzling structures in his brain are noted. The hospital's chief neurologist wants a closer look at them, but Flinx cannot allow that. He escapes without much difficulty, and travels to a rural area to wait for the search to die down. There, he is assaulted by two with beam weapons. They are not Qwarm assassins, whom he has met before. It is a complete mystery. His powers enable him to elude them; he makes it to his ship, and travels to the resort planet New Riviera.
But Flinx is not going there to relax. His situation is too urgent, for the dreams that plagued him earlier have returned. He badly needs someone to talk his troubles to. Such people are few and far between. He thinks one may be on New Riviera: a woman he traveled with before, who knows some things about his situation. Luck is with him; she is working as a gengineer for a pharmaceuticals company. She also has a fiancé: a jealous man who proves determined to eliminate Flinx as competition for Charity Held. Flinx survives several of his attacks, until he finally by devious means manages to drug the younger man. In the nick of time, Flinx is rescued by two old friends. They, along with Charity (who now knows something about his ominous dreams), plan to search for a weapon against the mysterious evil that lies behind them.1
But at the spaceport on New Riviera, they are again attacked by a mysterious group intent on killing them. This group soon runs into a squad of peacekeepers, and fierce crossfire ensues. Flinx and his friends escape the battle, but Charity is wounded. Flinx makes his two old friends promise to care for Charity. He heads up to his ship alone (but for Pip.) There he finds the air drugged by the two who he met on Goldin IV, who have somehow gained entrance. They have no reluctance to explain their purpose. They mean to kill him, and in this instance will steer his ship into the sun, dying with him. This nearly works, but after several days a new party takes a hand, and Flinx once again cheats Death.
Alan Dean Foster is one of today's more prolific science fiction authors. The adventures of Pip and Flinx are his most successful series. It includes 18 novels to date, the last published in 2017; another 13 are set in the Thranx Commonwealth but do not feature Flinx. Some of them2 are excellent, but I rate this one merely good. The two he met on Goldin IV, and again as he left New Riviera, are able to invade secure areas too easily. I got the impression Foster aims to stretch Flinx's saga as far as he can.
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