Man, sci-fi was the shit at one time. And by that I mean that everyone wanted to jump on the bandwagon and make a buck, or back then about thirty-five cents per book. Laser Books was a sideproject of sorts of a famous, and still active, Canadian book powerhouse company of doom. The idea for this series was simple. Get a bunch of authors, some well-known, have them write original stories that didn't appear elsewhere, keep them no longer than 60,000 words, serialize it, and call it a day. Laser Books released three books per month for about a year, and then suddenly tanked. It's really not clear why this happened, but it's most likely that the quality overall wasn't very good, as well as the fact that a few authors, including Piers Anthony, were pretty pissed about their work being butchered.
Anyway, this is the first Laser Book I found and the first one I've read, so I can't judge the entire series as a whole, which, by the way, is not sequential or anything. All the books are stand-alone, they were just released with nice little numbers and a cool "series" look so that later freaks would want to collect them. The Horde was book 27 in the line, written by Joseph Green, who did a ton of short stories for sci-fi mags and wrote a number of works along the way. This one was his entry in the Laser Books sci-fi store/subscription attack. First off, let's check the cover.
What in the hell is going here? I still look at this one and wonder what Kelly Freas was thinking, a famous sci-fi illustrator, by the way. In the background you have some representative terrain that you'll encounter in the story, so that's fine, and then you have the alien race in question in most of the book, the Shemsi. What the fuck is with the floating head? I assume it's the main character, but I didn't personally picture him with such a Flash Gordon chin and smug, asswipe attitude. All he needed was a stogie and a hovering, diembodied gun or some shit. Anyway...
In The Horde, main character Leo Volz and his woman become marooned on a planet that functions as a disputed territory between humans and a race of weirdos called the Shemsi. Leo's chick is taken to the Shemsi home planet for study, primarily because the Shemsi are asexual and want to learn how humans work, thinking that changing their genetics can eventually lead to a better society. The Shemsi are birthed by one of three uber moms on their home planet, and depending on which mother (they go through periods of control of their society), the Shemsi are one of three personality types and have one of three major positions in their society.
So, Leo ends up saving one of the Shemsi from a bizarre alien beast, and then convinces him (well, so he thinks, it's really further work of the Mothers) to help him retrieve his beloved bang toy. What follows is a pretty tense lead-up to the Shemsi encampment, and then the eventual landing on the Shemsi world. Really, the book is pretty damn interesting up to this part. It has the typical 'what would aliens be like' thing going on; lots of weird devices, creatures, and so forth, but it plays its part well. However, this begins to change about halfway through, and then The Horde reaches a rather boring portion that doesn't let up until the end.
See, this novel takes the approach of the film 'Enemy Mine', just being used here as an example. You have two races that don't understand each other, two representatives of those races who get stuck somewhere for some reason, and then who learn to like each other and appreciate, for the most part, what each has to offer. That's the general run of what The Horde is, because the freaking pathway to the giant mountain where the Mothers live is long as shit. Where this novel suffers is the extremely lengthy amount of time spent with both Leo and Erith (the Shemsi dude) traveling over inhospitable terrain. You learn a lot about Shemsi and there are some decent segments where their culture is explained, but overall this whole section is about as interesting as walking through the desert, and that's about what it amounts to too. There are only so many times you can read about their various tribulations as they learn to navigate the terrain, and though the culture background is cool, when it comes down to it you have another sci-fi romp in the wasteland going on here. Really a shame, because in general The Horde is an easy and fairly interesting read. If you're looking for a dude-meets-alien-and-befriends-him story, this one delivers, but be prepared to join them in their harrowing quest to the point that you start to feel their pain. Sometimes, you might want to put it down for awhile. There are, however, worse novels out there with wasteland portions, so don't expect it to be too bad.
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