Ace of Saints

Freelance Courier #2

by Lawrence M. Schoen

Angela Colson can’t pay the repair bill on her spaceship and has no choice but to accept a dubious proposition: bring back a miracle from the hands of the alien Prophet of Containers and all her debts will be paid.

Of course it’s not so simple. Her employer will telepathically know if she even attempts deception. The Prophet wants to recruit her to help get his message out to the masses. And an ancient intelligence wants her to alter that message to change the fate of a lost race.

Along the way she'll get schooled by a professional liar, solve an epic problem of littering, and confront a religious mob accusing her of blasphemy and heresy!

Ace of Saints is the second book in the Freelance Courier series featuring Angela (Gel) Colson, a teenage girl who only looks human but is actually a mutant variant from a race of teleporting aliens. Her people want her to settle down, stay out of trouble, and not use her powers. She wants to make her own way in the galaxy and live a life of adventure. And trouble? That just has a way of following her wherever she goes.

Genres: Science Fiction

207 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 5, 2021

About the author

Lawrence M. Schoen holds a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology, is a past Astounding, Hugo, and Nebula, nominee, twice won the Cóyotl award for best novel, founded the Klingon Language Institute, and occasionally does work as a hypnotherapist specializing in authors’ issues. He is a chimeric cancer survivor.

His science fiction includes many light and humorous adventures of a space-faring stage hypnotist and his alien animal companion. Other works take a very different tone, exploring aspects of determinism and free will, generally redefining the continua between life and death. Sometimes he blurs the funny and the serious. Lawrence lives near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania with his wife and their dog.

Reviews

[Doug · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lawrence Schoen's Ace of Saints is about Gel (Angela), a young cosmic courier who looks like a 17 year old female, but is only 13 and human only on the surface. Schoen has a list of academic credits and scholarly accomplishments longer than your arm and it is clear that he has philosophical and psychological elements folded into his story. Memory, trust, the definition of "human," what -- and how? -- is religion, the complexity of language human and otherwise, etc. are all part of the package. (I don’t doubt that I missed some nuances.) But with all that it’s still a fun read.

The relationships of galactic races and different species are dealt with in an even handed, sometimes ironically humorous and always thought-provoking way and with a sensitivity that shows the author has a considerable insight into life as we know it, while also a good handle on imaginative variations on it.

The novel is very light on violence: a mob forms a couple times, but the impending danger is quickly defused, once thanks to the main character Gel’s cleverness. There are no bang-bang galactic shoot-em ups. So much for the violence. But what about sex, you wonder? It appears only in a theoretical (educational?) form: “Would it help you perhaps to know that, even among the Swope with our four sexes and gender fluidity across multiple continua, our varieties of combinations of two and three partners for procreation and a host of both reciprocal and non reciprocal orientations that are currently responsible for the major portion of our export to your Arconi trade commission, that even with all of that there are Swope like yourself who are asexual?” If you find that sexy, this is the book for you. Seriously, the few sexual references in the story mostly take the form of teachable moments as Gel gets to know the Swope.

She meets some far-out and amusing Alice in Wonderlandesque characters. I also found echoes of the Wizard of Oz as she confronts strange situations utterly foreign to her experience. (Is the Prophet of Containers, who holds the population in thrall, something of a con man, like the Wizard? Or is his handing out miracles like they’re going out of style on the level?)

So, Ace of Saints is a good read, with entertaining conflicts and resolutions, and call-backs to aspects of earlier Schoen works (Conroy, Buffalito, etc.) to perhaps pique the reader's curiosity for further exploration of his oeuvre. Ultimately, the novel made me feel like I was getting a break from our currently awful world for the duration of my reading. And that, along with the other positives I've mentioned, prompts me to recommend it.

[Dr susan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Unique, fascinating sci fi adventure

Set in the fantastically diverse universe of the Conroy series, the Ace series is just plain wonderful sci fi adventure. Gel is a marvelous character, the aliens are believable and intriguing, and the story is engrossing. I admit the Runyon and the Emperor forced me to reread more than a few paragraphs, until I realized Gel was as confused as I was. Best of all is the absence of the death and violence that is so prevalent in a lot of current science fiction books. Ace is a breath of fresh air.

[Nan Silvernail · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gel meets the Runyon.
Gel, the freelance courier, is in a jam. Her ship has just been repaired, but for a lot more than she anticipated the price would be. Ouch!
But, she meets an alien in the waiting room who has a peculiar way with his speech and offers a way for her to earn the money to reclaim her ship.
Will she be able to pull the job off before time runs out?
On this one, only the saints of an alien planet know.

[David H. · Rating 3 out of 5]

In a bind with repair payments on her ship, Gel agrees to a job to assess a miracle-granting alien saint. Fairly fun and breezy, but the premise seemed to really really take a long time to set up. I also had a little trouble buying how outside-oriented the Swopes were when there were apparently only 2 humans actually on the planet.