Relic

Relic by Alan Dean Foster



Alan Dean Foster is One Of The Nice Ones (OOTNO). His books are always nice with nice characters who are involved in difficulties that eventually they can work themselves out of. He has a trademark light, humorous approach to his stories and it is always a pleasure to read his stories.

“Relic” is no different.

Humanity had a nice run. It colonized, created empires, fought among itself, reached heights, but that's all over since someone uncorked the Aura Malignance which targeted only humans. All humans have been killed off except Ruslan. An alien race named the Myssari find him among the ruins on the planet Seraboth. The Myssari are plaeased to have a human specimen to unravel the mysteries of the many human colonies they and other alien races have discovered in the formerly human quadrant of the galaxy.

However, the Myssari are civilized. They recognize Ruslan's rights and want to make him happy. Ruslan's chief emotion seems to be sulking. He doesn't seem to miss humanity, which after all, was stupid enough to kill itself off. He is definitely cool to the Myssari idea of resurrecting the human race by cloning Ruslan.

In order to advance their agenda, they offer to locate legendary Earth for Ruslan. Along the way, Ruslan crosses path with another alien race that doesn't seem as nice as the Myssari. They also find some survivors.

Do they find Earth? That would give it away, but I will say that there is a particular Foster story that this story put me in mind of.

The story is nice but slow. No one seemed in any particular hurry to get anywhere. Ruslan is nice but not very motivated. The ending didn't surprise me for the reason I said. I didn't see that this was the introduction to further books, but it doesn't surprise me.

The author seems to have a gift for presenting unique alien cultures without relying on the over-done trope of being relentlessly antagonistic and/or evil. Foster's aliens are non-humanoid, but truly civilized races, and part of the fun of this book was seeing how they related to others but also to the universe which has recently become nearly devoid of humanity. And therein lies the focal point of most of the book: when a single human is discovered wandering on one of the many depopulated human colony worlds, the aliens that discover him must try to find out two things: (1) Why he did not perish along with the rest of humanity? (2) Is what brought about the downfall of humans still active in the galaxy? A fun read!