Wild Country – Anne Bishop

Imagine a world in which cats prey on mice. (Okay, so far not hard to imagine.) Every now and then the mice get uppity and plot to bell the cats, or otherwise gain the upper hand. Except that in the rare cases where cats need to worry about mice they can call upon panthers for help. And if the panthers run into trouble they can call upon tigers. And if the tigers can’t handle some uppity mice, there are sabertooth tigers living in the hills.

This is the world of the Others - a world in which the Terra Indigine prey on Humans, and sometimes Humans get uppity and go after the most-visible-but-weakest of the Terra Indigine (think werewolves and vampires), at which point the truly-dangerous cousins come in to help. This cycle forms the backdrop to most of the books in this series: Some bad Humans - interested in power or profit and underestimating the danger - attempt to harm the Others, or at least Humans some Others care about and are crushed. In some of the books, a good deal of collateral damage ensues.

“Wild Country” like most of the books in this series, must struggle to maintain narrative tension. There isn’t much doubt that the bad mice are going to be eaten in the end. There is only some doubt about which of the good mice will become collateral damage. The successful story-telling deals with those Humans who have some success in integrating their lives with those of Others.

It doesn’t feel as if the world portrayed in these books would work. (I cheerfully grant that many of the readers don’t care.) On the Human side, the economy seems to function in a vacuum. For example, despite Humans being restricted to slivers of land, limited resources, and limited trade, they are still able to research and produce and maintain cell phones and computers. On the Terra Indigene side, the ecology doesn’t make sense. The Others don’t starve (or eat each other) despite there being no prey that can reasonably survive them.

What’s left is a morality play. The Humans who are willing to live simple and productive lives in harmony with nature (here represented by super-predators) live (sometimes happily ever after) and the others die.