The Man Who Used the Universe

by Alan Dean Foster

No one knows the true motives of Kees vaan Loo-Macklin. He’s a mastermind criminal who gave up his place at the head of the dark underworld to become a legitimate member of Evenwaith’s cities. But soon he was reaching out to powerful enemies—-the slimy aliens called the Nuel. Loo-Macklin negotiates an illusory peace agreement and gains precious alien secrets in the process. Is he after peace, power or pure evil? With enemy starships beginning to amass, we won’t have to wait long to find out.

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction, Audiobook, Science Fiction Fantasy, Space Opera, Novels, Space

320 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1983

About the author

Bestselling science fiction writer Alan Dean Foster was born in New York City in 1946, but raised mainly in California. He received a B.A. in Political Science from UCLA in 1968, and a M.F.A. in 1969. Foster lives in Arizona with his wife, but he enjoys traveling because it gives him opportunities to meet new people and explore new places and cultures. This interest is carried over to his writing, but with a twist: the new places encountered in his books are likely to be on another planet, and the people may belong to an alien race.

Foster began his career as an author when a letter he sent to Arkham Collection was purchased by the editor and published in the magazine in 1968. His first novel, The Tar-Aiym Krang, introduced the Humanx Commonwealth, a galactic alliance between humans and an insectlike race called Thranx. Several other novels, including the Icerigger trilogy, are also set in the world of the Commonwealth. The Tar-Aiym Krang also marked the first appearance of Flinx, a young man with paranormal abilities, who reappears in other books, including Orphan Star, For Love of Mother-Not, and Flinx in Flux.

Foster has also written The Damned series and the Spellsinger series, which includes The Hour of the Gate, The Moment of the Magician, The Paths of the Perambulator, and Son of Spellsinger, among others. Other books include novelizations of science fiction movies and television shows such as Star Trek, The Black Hole, Starman, Star Wars, and the Alien movies. Splinter of the Mind's Eye, a bestselling novel based on the Star Wars movies, received the Galaxy Award in 1979. The book Cyber Way won the Southwest Book Award for Fiction in 1990. His novel Our Lady of the Machine won him the UPC Award (Spain) in 1993. He also won the Ignotus Award (Spain) in 1994 and the Stannik Award (Russia) in 2000.

Reviews

[Brett · Rating 5 out of 5]

I know this isn't anything like great literature, but I guess it speaks to me. It's probably the book I've read more times than any other, just because I never get tired of the twists and turns. I also love the idea, as outrageous as it is, that one man is able to reinvent himself and manipulate people and events to such an extent.

[Craig · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a nice space-opera story, but not among Foster's best. I see it as something of a riff on Heinlein's The Man Who Sold the Moon, but with a somewhat psychopathic version of Delos Harriman. It's not part of his Humanx Commonwealth sequence. The aliens are a little too one-dimensionaly evil, and though it all comes together well enough in a narrative fashion, it's impossible to get very vested in any of the characters. My hardbound book club edition of the book has a cover that looks like a very old Luke Skywalker pondering constipation.

[Ninja · Rating 5 out of 5]

I first read this book maybe 20 years ago. Accidentally started reading it again when trying to determine if it was the book I recalled, but I recalled so little I had to read a hell of a lot of pages before I became convinced.
Cracker of a story, still highly readable.

[Jay French · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found it hard to rate this one. Some aspects I really liked, like the descriptions of the aliens and the focus on business relationships and competitive learning (call me weird). Some aspects, like the pacing and the unsympathetic protagonist (a burly, Steve Jobs type), rubbed me the wrong way. I'm a ADF fan from decades back, so I'll likely read more, but this one didn't nudge me into reading more of his books faster.

[Brian · Rating 4 out of 5]

About the only thing keeping this from being a five star book for me was the occasional inability to suspend disbelief. The premise of the story is great, but sometimes the character interactions fall a little flat. The main character is a master manipulator, so when those manipulations seem a little stretched, the fantasy breaks down a bit.

Considering I read the entire thing in one night, it was hard for me to put down. A very entertaining read.

[Khari · Rating 2 out of 5]

Well, that was very nearly a waste of three days.

I am sorely disappointed. I went to the library to pick up a book I had requested and it was too hot to leave it, so I stayed for an hour or so to enjoy the air conditioning and meander around to see if anything looked interesting. I'd had a couple of Alan Dean Foster books on my to-read list for a while, the library didn't have them, but I did see this one, so I grabbed it. After all, I had enjoyed a Splinter of the Mind's Eye and Kingdoms of Light when I was young, so I went in full of nostalgia and hope.

It was dashed. Utterly dashed.

This book was boring. Well, I suppose boring isn't the right word, because I finished it, and while I was reading it, I didn't want to stop reading it. I wanted to believe that there was more to it and to the main character than there was.

This is the story of a sociopath who rises to complete power to the point where he is controlling the business and government of four intergalactic races all because his mommy abandoned him and people made fun of his looks. On such petty things empire is born.

Boring.

I hate it when people use abuse as a plot point. The author says "This person was abused" and all the readers are supposed to go "Oh, so that's why." It's never explored, the ramifications are never dealt with, the emotions and the trauma are never described, how the event serves as motivation is never built up into anything, it's just a descriptive event, treated the same way as his physical appearance. He looks like an orangutan, his mother abandoned him. The end. So irritating. Kees never even figures out himself why he is so driven. He's driven so that no one will ever control him, and that's as far as he goes? This is the man who is smart enough to fool two different world governments, smart enough so that only one brilliant psychologist even has an inkling of a suspicion about him, oh but wait, that's all by design too. He's that smart and brilliant to manipulate every other sentient being, and he's never thought to do some self-introspection in order to build a philosophy for his drive? That's highly unlikely. People need stories, they need a self-narrative, they need a reason for their purpose and drive. The people who have such reasons succeed, those who do not fail. Even sociopaths have reasons for what they do, this book doesn't have any of that, and I am sorely disappointed with it. I like reading because I like finding out how people other than myself think, this character doesn't think. He does not consider his own actions. Everyone considers their own actions! It's weird and dull and uninteresting.

Everyone in this book is so bloody trusting....except the main character and the people he engineers to be suspicious of him. No one is smart enough to juggle that many people. And no one is that trusting of someone with that much power. Look at George Washington, I think the only person in the world of democracies who was freely elected unanimously...twice. And people suspected him! And talked about him! Read the private letters, people did not like George Washington and were worried that he had too much power and confronted him about it and plotted about it behind his back, yet no one is doing that for a guy who is a known murderer and not only holds complete political power but is a multi-bazillionaire?! This is ignoring human nature! I hate when authors do it. It's too unrealistic of a world to believe in.

The other thing that bothered me is the Nuel and their technology and their manner of speaking. I know. I know. No one else in the world cares about the linguistic analysis of the Nuel's speaking mannerisms. But they don't make sense! They aren't systematic! Language is always systematic! Even when the rules are broken, they are broken in a systematic way! Not the Nuel. The author is doing a bunch of left dislocation to make what they say sound a little bit odd, just a little tweaking here and there to make them sound alien. But he doesn't do it systematically! It's just random! Gah! I hate that. He refers to human hair as 'head fur' but then randomly as 'hair' by the same character! Did you just forget? Was this as an attempt to show that the alien has fully transitioned to humanoid culture that they now know the proper terminology? Then do some foreshadowing! Bring in some development! Not just a sudden unexplained change!

And finally the lehl. That is literally the stupidest idea I have ever heard of. I'm going to implant a little creature into your brain, and tell you to think a thought, if you ever think anything that goes against that thought, the creature will poison you to death and you will die. Sounds legit, right? I mean a great way to keep someone under control, right? Just one teensy little problem. How are you going to ensure that the person you are implanting is thinking the thought that you are telling them to think?

.....

I'm waiting.

The Nuel don't have thought reading or thought producing technology, neither do the humans, so how, pray tell, do they know that the person that they are implanting is not thinking 'chocolate is good' while they are telling them to think 'do nothing that is not in the best interests of the Nuel race'? And they think they are safe by this? Dumbest concept I have ever read.

[Morris Nelms · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've read it twice. It is a unique book. While it seems to be science fiction on the surface, it is much more than that. It is worth reading for the final sentence--Foster comes up with a brilliant 'punch line' to end the story.
Interesting is an overused word, but it is the correct word to describe this book, along with fascinating, provocative, etc. (All the buzz words too often used to describe books that make you think!).
Loved it the first time and I loved it more the second time. Don't miss this one.

[astaliegurec · Rating 3 out of 5]

Alan Dean Foster's "The Man Who Used the Universe" suffers from two fairly big faults. First, after the initial crisis point, you pretty much know exactly how the rest of the book will play out. Second, we really don't have a protagonist (or even a main character) until someplace around the half-way point in the book. The character everything revolves around is a total cipher or enigma to us throughout the book. We have no idea of what he's thinking, what his goals are, or why he behaves the way he does. At that half-way point, we're introduced to what seems to be a secondary or even tertiary character and he suddenly morphs into our main, voiced character and protagonist (or maybe an antagonist -- it's hard to tell with this book). If the plot weren't so painfully obvious, I'd say there'd really be nothing wrong with that. But, since I spent the last third of the book rolling my eyes and wondering why the other characters didn't figure things out, the best I can rate the book is an OK 3 stars out of 5. Get it from the library.

[PSXtreme · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent Sci-Fi Adventure. Pick this one up at the next opportunity. This one will keep you guessing until the final page is turned.

[Cheryl · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not my kind of thing at all, but I am interested in Foster's writing. And once I got going in this, I found it almost compulsively readable. Very 'manly' though, ruthless politics & weapons & the very few women as either accessories or bitches etc.

Several reviewers mentioned aliens... I've barely glimpsed them, at p. 70 out of 243... we'll see....
---
ok, p. 100 we meet the key aliens and they swiftly become much more interesting characters than The Man.

I do like the "What If" that is What if business owners realized that healthy and happy employees would be more productive? Kees figures it out, and turns a world that is a polluted hell-hole into one with parks and gardens for all to enjoy.

But a lot of this is something that a fan of Ayn Rand would enjoy, too, and it makes me uncomfortable. Well, I'm nearly done now, actually....
---
Ok done.
Yeah, I'm still not a fan of political intrigue. At least in this case the SF element was important... it would not have been as interesting as if it were written as if it were ordinary Earth history.

But at least Foster didn't lose me; I was able to keep track. And it was a clever tale. And, yes, the aliens were cool.

It's not great literature by any means, and is in some ways written almost at a teen level. But I respect that a lot of readers love it, and if you're interested and can borrow a copy from your library or otherwise get it cheap, go for it.

2.5 stars rounded up because Foster educated me, by giving the man a memorial on one of the worlds in the story, Jorge Amado.

[Joey Brockert · Rating 4 out of 5]

Keesvaan Loo-Macklin is an interesting fellow. He is better than James Bond because he does not allow himself to get caught – he anticipates the traps and challenges that may happen and works around them. Sometimes it not needed, but often, it is.
He lives in the future, on a world that is uninhabitable except in some tube cities. The environment has been ruined by the need to extract raw materials and process it into useful products. It is a very stratified society and he is near the bottom. His first assignment is to kill a shopkeeper who is not willing to pay for protection. Being near the bottom just means that you do the dirty work of getting something for nothing, like extorting money for protection rackets. This is not as near the bottom as he could be – he is not reduced to burglary or armed robbery, but he is involved with the underground, illegal businesses.
His history is sad, but he learned from it how to survive and flourish. This is truly a remarkable person who climbs from these bottom trenches of society to the highest, literally, that is possible, and barely with any hitches in the road. I must admit it has been some time since I read this story, so I may be not remembering some parts accurately.

[Kevin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not exactly my favorite ADF book but interesting nonetheless. This was strange to me in that it was not really written as an action novel or even a character study. There is very little outright description of the characters, events, or environment. This whole thing mostly plays out in conversations and introspective monologues without ever being obvious about it a la World War Z. I guess my biggest complaint would be that the main character is not exactly likeable and because of the form of storytelling the reader NEVER gets into his head in any meaningful way. We find out about his thoughts and motivations through conversations with others and the results of actions taken by others and are kept guessing the whole time whether he is actually a good guy or bad and whether he is supernaturally smart or just plain devious. This just left me a bit cold. Fascinated in a strange way, but cold.

[Rodzilla · Rating 4 out of 5]

ADF sometimes has trouble coming up with a good title. This one may be his worst. The cover of the older edition, which I read, is also pretty ridiculous, evoking an older, pulp fiction tradition. When I started reading, I thought, "Oh no. This is a banged out potboiler."

But here's the thing. It kept getting more and more interesting. ADF is great at aliens, and this contains some of his best. And there are some excellent twists that I really did not see coming. So by the time I finished I was really enjoying the ride. I consider these to be better than most of his Pip and Flinx books (one of which have ever really impressed me too much.)

I think I also appreciate stand-alone books more. The burst of creativity is more appealing to me than the milking of yet another series. I know publishers love series because they are much easier to sell, through name recognition. But never having heard of this one, I preferred it to most of ADF's more prominent works.

[Spencer · Rating 4 out of 5]

A space opera of engaging magnitude, this tale follows lowly criminal Kees vaan Loo-Macklin on his meteoric, albeit slow and deliborate, rise to undisputed "ruler" of the known universe, even though those around him are not privvy to this title (i.e. he is viewed, at large, as a humanitarian and savior of the known worlds, not a driven machavellian "madman"). Engrossing, deliberate, well-paced, focusing on character more than action, this little novel delivers. ADF is a clean writer, in that he doesn't rely on flowery prose or extended verbiage to get his point across, rather his writing fits the titular character to a T: exact and to the point, yet no less thrilling.

[FLY-N-X777 · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've been reading Alan Dean Fosters books since I seen him at a book signing for vanishing point In the 80's. I didn't want to by the same book as my girlfriend to get signed. So I bought for "love of mother not" and since then I've almost all of his books.
I like the book eventhough its not a part of the common wealth series but this books character has been in the back of my mind for 20 plus years I'm always try and think what was the answer to question his alien freind asked?
You might as well read it, what else are you going to do?
Go to the movie theatre and see some over rehashed unimagintive sequel, averyone can do that and then you can think like they do to.
Ltr

[Scott S. · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars

I quit this book once after only 20 minutes or so because it wasn't holding my attention. Having read and really enjoyed only one other of Alan Dean Foster's books I forced myself to come back and give it a second chance.

Overall I would say I liked the book, but it was slow and didn't have much of a payoff.

The narrator was okay, but didn't do much for me and was probably part of the problem.

[Ryan Diaz · Rating 4 out of 5]

The first sci-fi book I've read in my adult years and I'll be honest, there were bits that were hard to get through. Not sure if it was the writing, the genre or my own intellectual hold ups but some of the sections seemed very dense to me.

Other than that, it was a great book! A lot of twists and turns and shocking revelations. Not sure what I was expecting but it wasn't this story of business and manipulation. Not sure if I'd recommend it but I'm happy to have read it.

[Roy · Rating 2 out of 5]

Picked this up out of curiosity. I have read a fair amount of Foster and have enjoyed his writing. I had never seen this older book and thought I'd give it a spin.
I see that some people loved this book in the reviews. While I agree the plot has some interesting twists and I enjoyed the description of the Nuel culture, I found the book to be flat and lifeless, just like the protagonist.

[Dannan Tavona · Rating 5 out of 5]

Holds Up Well

Science Fiction
I first read this book more than twenty years ago. Some of the details remained, but others faded. So I bought it again and reread it. It's a fascinating story of a broken man who finds a purpose that ultimately benefits two initially suspicious stellar powers -- human and Nuel. The truly tragic part was that of his wife, who only had two very small scenes in the overall tale. Fascinating character study. Recommended.

[Aaron Meadows · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think they could have shortened the main characters name and it would have shortened the book by at least 5 pages. Sometimes hard to understand what was going on for awhile and it seemed like the main character lived for hundreds of years, even though it wasn't, due to the constant jumping ahead in time and never knowing for sure how much time really went by each time they jumped.

[Curtis · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Great Read

I first read this over 20 years ago and very much enjoyed it then. Now in addition to the treasured paperback copy, I own an electronic copy, and I read it again after all these years. Still an excellent story. Highly recommended.

[lynn lantosh · Rating 5 out of 5]

Surprisingly intelligent.

When I first start Reading this book I felt neither like nor dislike find Force myself to continue Reading and I was caught in a Webb So intratt and so amazing so well-thought-out so in grossing that I couldn't put this book down for a second.

[David Gross · Rating 2 out of 5]

Bad, so very bad. I hope he got better as he matured because if not, there are a whole lot of crappy movie adaptations out there.

[C.K. Tomczyk · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read this for the first time when I was thirteen and I keep coming back for more!

[Marsha · Rating 4 out of 5]

Psychological and cultural study disguised as scifi. Enjoyable because of twist after twist. Dare you to predict this one.

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kind of a fun interesting read, though became predictable, i.e. you knew how it would turn out before you got to the dénouement.

[Dustless Walnut · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dumb but fun.

[Randall Andrews · Rating 4 out of 5]

Truly a unique character study, one of pity, one of morality, one of callous and one of love. It’s a wonderful piece of fiction that gets you at your core.

[David Colwell · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love this book. I've read it a number of times. I like books that cover a number of years in the main characters life, and this does that.

[Stephina · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of my favorite books. Glad I found it again.