Patriarch's Hope
A novel by David Feintuch

I just don't know why I keep doing this to myself. When first I read of Nicholas Seafort in Midshipman's Hope -- the beginning of the Seafort Saga -- I spent days afterward sighing listlessly at the futility of life and filled with a sense of all-pervading dread. When I recovered, and read the next in the series, Challenger's Hope, I then considered entering a life of quiet contemplation and renouncing Science Fiction in all its forms there ever after. And by the time I read Voices of Hope, the fifth book in the series, life had near-to lost all its meaning.

These books are so incredibly, overwhelmingly, depressingly sad. And yet they leave one so filled with hope (well, it's right there in their titles) that one can't help but go back into the Hell-future of Nicholas Ewing Seafort that they provide, just on the slightest chance that things get better for the poor boy.

When Nick Seafort, a teenager on his first stellar cruise, was forced to take command of the starship Hibernia and fight off an alien menace, it was a heart-wrenching, soul-searing read. His continued career in the Navy (but, the space kind, naturally), and then later in politics, was as despair ridden a can possibly be imagined. These books saw Nick betray and betrayed, destroy and destroyed -- and, oh Lord, they saw him suffer. And in Patriarch's Hope -- the latest, longest and, I hope and pray, last of this spirit-sucking series -- Nick, his family, friends, subordinates, and the very people of the planet he is sworn to protect, suffer right along with him.

The specifics of this book, and indeed the series, are too numerous and too damn painful to dwell upon. That notwithstanding, this is not a series of books that can be easily forgotten -- or easily given up. Each time a new installment is released I vow to myself: no. Not this time, David Bloody Feintuch. You won't catch me returning to your goddam universe of horror and despair. But each time I succumb to that metallic paperback cover... and always that hope. The hope that, surely, just once, I won't end a Seafort novel in uncontrollable sobs of grief for those who never existed, and an inconsolable sorrow that they never will. It has yet to happen.

Feintuch's writing holds a power little seen in Science Fiction, an honesty that burns like the acid rain he predicts, and a bleak despondency that is all the more frightening for being so very realistic. I do not like his books, and I will never give up the struggle to not read more of the troubled Nick Seafort and his cohorts, but I am forever changed for having read them. Maybe even in a good way.

Re-Read Factor: Oh God, no. No. Never. No.

Sequel Factor: Please, no. You're killing me. No.

Strong Chick Factor: Limited but evident. Actually, not that evident. Wife Arlene has improved, but she still seems to be around only to give our hero grief. Like everyone, and everything, else.

--- Rachel Hyland

Patriarch's Hope is currently available in hardcover from Little Brown and Company, and in paperback from Aspect Books.

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