I Read Books: Acorna's Quest

Having cornered the market on science fantasy dragons in the 70s with her Pern novels Ann McCaffrey had a go at doing the same with science fantasy unicorns in the 90s. For some reason I missed the fact that this is a 10 book series, and more confusingly I picked up number 2. Fortunately it has a fairly detailed “What has gone on before,” section.

This gives us the premise; some asteroid miners found a baby unicorn girl in a survival pod, raise her as their own and find she has healing powers as well as the ability to purify water and air with her horn. They have a lot of strange adventures as various people want to use Acorna for their own purposes, eventually helping liberate some child slaves into a moon colony.

All well and good; now an adult at the age of three Acorna decides to seek out the rest of her species. Everyone keeps trying to delay her so she and a friend sneak off in her ship, and ignore the urgent message. Messages that would tell them the hydroponics tanks are malfunctioning. When they find out they head for a planet for supplies to find that someone has stolen a weather control system and is holding it to ransom.
Meanwhile a ship of the unicorn people (the Linyaari) has entered the Federation. They need to warn them there’s hostile aliens heading this way! They completely misunderstand humans who misunderstand them back.

If this sounds like wacky hi-jinks and crazy coincidences, then that’s what it is. It moves along quickly, the good guys rush into places and make mistakes, and so do the bad ones. There’s a few scenes where the villains do some terribly awful things, but somehow I couldn’t take them seriously, not when there’s telepathic unicorn people wandering about trying to impersonate humans badly.

Read This: For some light, easy, forgettable science fantasy adventure
Don’t Read This: For hard-edged, gritty, entertainment with a stern eye turned towards shades of grey morality.