The Monitor, the Miners and the Shree

by Lee Killough

ROUTINE MISSION

The team from the Department of Surveys and Charters wasn't anticipating anything special on Nira. DSC policy called for periodic studies of developing races on proscripted worlds, and it was merely time for another look at the winged, stone-age Shree.

The team scientists were curious about how far the Shree might have come in their slow climb toward intelligence; Monitor Chemel Krar was mainly concerned with enforcing the absolute rule against any contact or interference with Nira's natives. The hardest part of the job would be sticking out the full five years of the study.

As it turned out, the study lasted five days. At the end of that time, one team member had died violently, and the rest were scattered over the face of Nira. Suddenly it was the Shree who were doing the studying...

Genres: Science Fiction

215 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published March 12, 1980

About the author

Lee Killough has been storytelling since the age of four or five, when she began making up her own bedtime stories. So when she discovered science fiction and mysteries about age eleven, she began writing her own science fiction and mysteries. Because her great fear was running out of these by reading everything her small hometown library had. It took her late husband Pat Killough, though, years later, to convince her to try selling her work. Her first published stories were science fiction and her short story, "Symphony For a Lost Traveler", earned a Hugo Award nomination in 1985.

She used to joke that she wrote SF because she dealt with non-humans every day...spending twenty-seven years as chief technologist in the Radiology Department at Kansas State University's Veterinary Medical Teaching Hospital before retiring to write full-time.

Because she loves both SF and mysteries and hated choose between the two genres, her work combines them. Except for one fantasy, The Leopard’s Daughter, most of her novels are mysteries with SF or fantasy elements...with a preference for supernatural detectives: vampire, werewolves, even a ghost. She has set her procedurals in the future, on alien words, and in the country of dark fantasy. Her best known detective is vampire cop Garreth Mikaelian, of Blood Hunt, Bloodlinks, and Blood Games. Five of her novels and a novella are now available as e-books and she is editing more to turn into e-books.

Lee makes her home in Manhattan, Kansas, with her book-dealer husband Denny Riordan, a spunky terrier mix, and a house crammed with books.

Reviews

[SciFiOne · Rating 5 out of 5]

1984 Grade B+
2004 Grade A
2024 Grade A-

This enjoyable SciFi novel has hovered about the same A- grade each of the three times I read it. It is a complex story with lots of speculations, no humans that I can verify, an alien planet, and many different species. A government monitor and a team of scientists show up on a proscribed planet to examine the progress of the intelligent natives, the Shree. They discover it is being illegally mined when they are attacked.

But the book's prose is just a little weak. I lost track of the various species in the early team and their names, and never really knew what they looked like. That aspect became lot better when the protagonist was living alone with the Shree. But there is quite a bit of introspection and repetition in that section Including a chapter in a courtroom. I did speed read some of that. Still very enjoyable as I said.

Recommended.

[Cheryl]

1/3, too bored to continue, especially because the blurb tells the story. If only the aliens were actually interesting.

[Kevin Phyland · Rating 3 out of 5]

Chemel is a monitor from the Department of Surveys and Charters (DSC) and is leading a survey team to Nira to see how the indigenous protosentients are doing after 500 years. What they find is flying machines, native Shree who speak Pan-Galactic and evidence that their secret observation post has been opened and used. Barely escaping an attack using gas unknown to the planet, Chemel and her crew are captured by bands of Shree who barter them away to different tribal groups for metal or other trade goods. The offworld illegal culprits are galactics who have reopened the forbidden mines while the monitors were absent and will stop at nothing to get rid of the witnesses. Hoping to get to their emergency retrieval signal beacons, they must first find each other and somehow defeat a well-equipped and desperate technologically superior enemy. Lee Killough has constructed a reasonably entertaining adventure yarn, but the aliens all act like humans in costumes, except the Shree, whose concept of karmic balance is a nice touch. Not sure I approve of the positive Cargo Cult vibe though.

[Alexander Winzfield · Rating 3 out of 5]

A bread and butter sci-fi tale of first contact. The varied aliens species are fun (and it's a nice twist that not a single human is among the cast). The story is serviceable but familiar; this feels like, with some mild modifications, it could have been a Star Trek treatment. It ticks along at a nice steady pace though, and has a plucky main character, which all aid in making this a mild recommendation.

[Ray L · Rating 3 out of 5]

A predictable story. The title is a summary of the plot, unfortunately; the beginning 10 or so pages did have promise though, but the opportunity was missed IMO. I would give it 2 stars if it weren't for the Shree; I enjoyed reading about them and their culture and curiosity.