Artemis Invaded

by Jane Lindskold

(Tor, June 2015, hc, 320 pp.)

Reviewed by Dave Truesdale

Artemis Invaded is the followup to Artemis Awakening (Tor, May 2014). Artemis is a long-forgotten planet, a world far from the hub of the current human spacefaring race, engineered from bare rock as a pleasure world for the elite of a once technologically advanced human empire. It was an Eden of sorts, all the technology skillfully hidden, and with the many animals and humans imported to live there (all bio-engineered), it promised just enough adventure and danger to give those wealthy elites the excitement they craved with just enough credibility to back their claims of braving “nature.”

A devastating war then shattered the human empire and a long dark age followed. Artemis is now less than a memory millennia after the war and is now naught but a fable told to children. Rebuilding enough of its lost technology to the point where space flight is now once again the norm but nowhere near its former level, archeologist Griffin Dane discovers hints of the lost pleasure planet and sets off clandestinely to find it, for it may hold important secrets to mankind regaining the keys to its lost power.

Griffin does indeed find Artemis but crashes his shuttle with no hope of communicating with his orbiting ship, which could then signal home for help. Stranded, he is rescued by the Huntress Adara and her psych-linked puma Sand Shadow. Having fallen from the sky, Adara believes Griffin to be one of the “Seegnur,” one of those original makers who built the planet and set the animals and engineered humans upon it to serve them. Griffin’s only desire is to get a message to his ship, but this seems virtually hopeless, for with Adara’s help he learns only bits and pieces of handed-down, piecemeal lore concerning the planet’s distant past, which doesn’t include the level of technology needed for him to get a message to his ship. Grasping at straws, Adara informs Griffin that there is one person who may be able to help, one man all of her people regard highly and respect—the Old One Who Is Young. But the Old One lives far away amid the ruins of one of the cities destroyed when the long-ago war found its way to Artemis, the invaders crushing the lightly defended world, its cities and inhabitants, destroying (almost) everything in their wake.

Adara, Sand Shadow, and Griffin set off for the Sanctum Santorum of the Old One Who Is Young with a small troupe of Adara’s trusted friends. During this journey Griffin learns more about Adara, her people (how some are born gifted with “adaptations” such as night vision, acute smell, psionic ability, and more, and are then sent while young to the Old One for further training), the planet itself and its history, their trek not always an easy one. In short, a number of mysteries are unfolding each in its turn piquing reader interest on several levels, while deftly advancing the plot.

What Griffin, Adara, and the others discover when finally arriving at the Old One’s Sanctum isn’t quite what they expected, for there are lost technological marvels and hidden dangers left from the dark centuries, some dormant and some in the process of awakening, with the Old One at the center of it all. The thrilling climax of Artemis Awakening ends with mad schemes exposed (one of which involves a horrific breeding experiment involving sexual slavery) and hints of further questions yet to be answered in Artemis Invaded, with Griffin still seeking the technology which will allow him to contact his orbiting ship and manufacture a way off the planet. It’s a wild ride and sets the stage perfectly for the events to take place in Artemis Invaded.

With the stage set in Artemis Awakening—the characters, scraps of the planet’s history, the present state of the lost world itself (now mostly backward agrarian villages with people living off the land—contrasted with the crumbling remnants of the planet’s high-tech glory days in which the Old One Who Is Young has made his home and whose centuries-long obsession is to restore one of the lost scientific secrets for his own ends), the reader is once again in for an adventure of the sort that made much of the revered Golden Age of SF what it was—stories of exotic places filled with mystery and color, with scientific wonders hardly distinguishable from magic, and larger than life characters placed in dire situations from which they must extricate themselves, and all amidst larger issues often with the fate of mankind at stake. It’s all here (or hinted at) in Artemis Invaded. Both books tease the imagination with secrets of the unknown at every turn, betrayals and treachery, the sense of wonder layered like petals of a flower, unfolding one at a time at the touch of the author’s pen. Perhaps the greatest secret of them all, trembling to reveal itself throughout both books, is the living planetary intelligence of Artemis itself, roused from its centuries-long slumber in fits and starts—stirring to life as the connections and pathways of its long dormant consciousness make contact with those who can hear its silent beckoning—and all due to the chance intervention of Griffin Dane, an archeologist from a distant star, and Adara, the Huntress, and her psyche-linked puma Sand Shadow (the latter a nostalgic nod to some of Andre Norton’s most well-loved adventures), descendants of those enhanced humans and animals engineered to serve their makers, now long dead. But as Artemis clears the fog of sleep and begins to remember, there are questions it (along with Griffin) must find answers to (why was it not totally destroyed during the war, who made that decision, and why?), not to mention a priceless bit of knowledge yet to be discovered that will place Adara and Griffin at the center of even more peril than before. All this, no doubt, will be revealed in the third book of the Artemis sequence, and I can hardly wait. Both Artemis Awakening and Artemis Invaded combine to give the reader who loves exciting planetary adventure–suffused with (always cool) ancient crumbling ruins, wonders of super science once thought lost but now found, and a crackling good story racing through it all–a rewarding experience. Jane Lindskold is a seasoned storyteller who knows her craft, and if you’ve never encountered her work before these novels are a great place to start. You get your money’s worth with Artemis Awakening and Artemis Invaded, and as a bonus both are suitable for adults and the mature teenager alike. (While nothing is graphically depicted, the sexual slavery, along with the descriptions of physical and emotional abuse of females might be a little too much for some younger readers, so parental discretion is advised).

Dave Truesdale has edited Tangent and now Tangent Online since 1993. It has been nominated for the Hugo Award five times, and the World Fantasy Award once. A former editor of the Bulletin of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America, he also served as a World Fantasy Award judge in 1998, and for several years wrote an original online column for The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Now retired, he keeps close company with his SF/F library, the coffeepot, and old movie channels on TV. He lives in Kansas City, MO.