Dirge is a science fiction

Science fiction

Science fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with imaginary but more or less plausible content such as future settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, aliens, and paranormal abilities...

 novel

Novel

A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....

 written by Alan Dean Foster

Alan Dean Foster

Alan Dean Foster is an American author of fantasy and science fiction. He currently resides in Prescott, Arizona, with his wife, and is also known for his novelizations of film scripts...

. The full title is sometimes shown as Dirge: Book Two of The Founding of the Commonwealth.

Plot summary

It has been twenty years since the chance meeting of street thug Cheelo Montoya and thranx poet Desvendapur revealed the insectoid alien colony hidden deep within the Amazon Basin

Amazon Basin

The Amazon Basin is the part of South America drained by the Amazon River and its tributaries that drains an area of about , or roughly 40 percent of South America. The basin is located in the countries of Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Peru, and Venezuela...

, and not much has changed.

Humanity has recently discovered the planet Argus V, better known as Treetrunk, with the intention of colonizing the planet when their survey team is visited by a new alien race, the Pitar

Pitar

Pitar is a genus of venerid bivalve mollusc containing over 60 species....

. At first the humans worry that the Pitar will want to lay claim to the planet, but the instead of wanting to claim territory, the aliens instead simply want to observe the humans.

The Pitar are a close human analog to humans, appearing to be perfectly human except for a wider variety of hair and eye colors (including blue and violet among them) along with nearly god-like physiques. Most humans almost immediately view the Pitar as perfect. This complicated matters for the insectoid Thranx who wish to form a closer alliance with the humans. Some xenophobic humans go so far as to invade the small Thranx colony in the Amazon, killing many of the insect colonists. While this causes a political nightmare for both humans and Thranx, it also brings together the human chaplain and Thranx spiritual advisor who form the United Church.

While the three races continue their political dance, a massacre occurs on Treetrunk. All 600,000 humans are killed by unknown attackers who then leave the planet. After an extensive search for the murderers turns up no clue, a single survivor is found hiding in a lifeboat on the smaller of Treetrunk’s moons. Allwyn Mallory claims to have witnessed the massacre and has proof of the attacker’s identity, a memory cube that recorded the Pitar not only killing the humans on Treetrunk, but also eviscerating the females for the reproductive organs.

At first the Pitar demure the accusation, claiming that a single man’s accusations are groundless, but presented with the video proof the few Pitar on Terra

Earth

Earth is the third planet from the Sun, and the densest and fifth-largest of the eight planets in the Solar System. It is also the largest of the Solar System's four terrestrial planets...

at first flee, then either commit suicide when confronted or attack the humans attempting to place them under arrest resulting in their deaths.

The humans form a space armada with the intention of bringing war and destruction to the Pitar’s twin homeworlds. The Pitar, while having no ambition to invade the galaxy, have thought ahead and set up extensive defensive works around their solar system. The war quickly becomes a stalemate for the humans, even with their new Thranx allies, cannot break through the Pitarian defenses.

Only when the new allies develop a new weapon, the SCCAM missile—a nuclear warhead mounted on a starship’s KK-drive generator. This proves to be the tipping point of the war, though when a ground invasion of the Pitar’s homeworld was begun, the arrogant aliens refuse to surrender, fighting even when the obvious result would be death. This results in the eventual extinction of the Pitar. Only after the Pitar are exterminated, is it discovered why they had eviscerated the women on Treetrunk: the low reproductive rate of the Pitar put them at a disadvantage in comparison to other races. The Pitar sought to use human reproductive organs to supplement their own birth rates.

External links

• Alan Dean Foster homepage