A Forest of Stars
The Saga if Seven Suns, No. 2
By Kevin J. Anderson

    In Hidden Empire, Book 1 of The Saga of Seven Suns, two xenoarchaeologists, Louis and Margaret Colicos, discovered the ruins of the ancient Klikiss civilization. These insectile people had built a technologically superior civilization, then vanished. In attempting to piece together the Klikiss mystery, they found a piece of technology, the Klikiss Torch, a device that fired gas giant planets and turned them into stars. When it was tested on a gas giant called Oncier, it destroyed the aliens who lived at the core of the new sun. The hydrogues declared war.

     Explaining that the inadvertent destruction was an accident didn’t placate the hydrogues. They demanded that all skymining of hydrogen to produce ekti, the stardrive fuel all human economies depended on, be stopped. With their diamond-hulled warglobes, they seemed invincible.

     Now, in A Forest of Stars, the war worsens. Due to the dying economy, the Terran Hanseatic League’s Chairman, Basil Wenceslaus, has implemented unpopular austerity measures. The young king, Peter, who serves as figurehead for Wenceslaus, is forced to announce the measures. The Hansa Chairman is too focused on the "big picture" to see the damage to the millions of small pictures that make up the big one. King Peter sees the problems, but can he make Wenceslaus understand?

     A Forest of Stars is told from more than twenty points-of-view, and is confusing until the reader learns to hold all those threads in mind while pursuing the exploits of yet another new perspective. When the hydrogues begin to attack worlds of both the Ildiran Empire and Hansa colonies without provocation, things become even more complicated. It seems hopeless, but there is a reason for the hydrogues’ action. With that revelation, the book becomes riveting. None of the threads are forgotten as the reader rushes headlong to the edge of the cliff, where we are left to anticipate Book 3.