Strange Music: A Pip & Flinx Adventure

This is the first Pip and Flinx I’ve had occasion to delight in for many years!!

Pip, happily married, is living with his lady, Clarity, on the water world Cachalot. It is idyllic, and his floating habitation is beyond fault. Pip is happily hunting tasty critters and Flinx fishing for others, with whale and dolphin friends visiting and conversing…and of course Flinx is a tad bored. So when the now-mature and professional daughter of his old friend and mentor Truzenzuzex, Sylzenzuex, appears he is immediately engaged.

Not so Clarity, who reacts to Flinx’s long-established empathic bond vis a vis the Thranx lady with more than a bit of wifely jealousy and also resentment that Flinx is inclined to go off at Syl’s bidding.

Largess is a planet the Commonwealth Government and the Church Universal are constrained from engaging upon with modern technologies, but there is hope an empathic talent and a deadly minidrag will substitute. A deadly chase, alien sentients, their culture, fellow planetaries, and a particularly difficult mode of communication comprise the rest of the tale.

Here I will inject my only criticism of this reintroduction of the intriguing Thranxian race: they are described as terrified of deep water, as sinking like chitinous stones…and in an earlier P&F I remember a scene in the tidewater of Earth where Thranx were playing with human friends in the surf, the Thranx gleefully acting as surfboards. ???

Happily worth reading.