The Tower and the Hive: Tower and Hive, Book 5

Anne McCaffery's talent series is a realistic observation of humanity in a Science Fiction setting. I am amazed at how there is something to identify with in every book and each story ends with a positive and hopeful note. This book is a satisfying conclusion to an amazing series.

Who really wrote this book? I have to wonder if Todd McCaffrey didn't in fact write this.That's the only explanation I can come up with for her having seemed to forget her characters so completely.I just finished reading the whole Talent series back to back and the difference between those books and this is striking.What happened? I have been wondering what the deal is with her allowing her son Todd to tinker with Pern, the results of which you can read about in other reviews here on this site. Suffice it to say, they have not been a roaring success.I personally think he had a large hand in this one, even if he received no credit for it. Why? After 5 years with no sequel, all of a sudden she decides to come back, like with Skies of Pern and just like that book, this one has some major problems. For example, the woodenness, the unfamiliarity of all the characters we have come to love from the last 4 books. The characters just feel all wrong, almost like in fanfic when someone tries hard to emulate the original, but is just too self aware.What about the Rowan? She makes glorified cameos, along with Damia and Afra. And frankly, they were the only reasons I kept reading this book. But they don't appear all that much and the reader is left with the boring personalities of their cookie-cutter children. The once interesting and vibrant characters in the first novels have been radically changed, as if McCaffrey did indeed forget them. In this book, Afra is described as being `methody' when in fact the entire background of the Damia novel was all about him NOT being methody, which was why he had to leave Capella. Jeff Raven is now a Peter Reidinger clone, shamelessly manipulating his horde of offspring and heavily pressuring them to accept outposts on planets light years away from family and friends. The Rowan is somewhere in the background there. She has one or two paragraphs, but not much else. What happened to the Jeff Raven who wanted to rebel? Or even the Rowan for that matter.My other misgivings about this so-called `ending' are these:1. The plot meanders all over the place. I mean, why is the Hiver Queen now into her third book of incarceration, and no one has a clue how to talk to her yet? Zara was supposed to be the liaison with godlike gifts of empathy, but she goes on to other things and never comes in contact with the Hiver Queen again. Later they attribute her understanding of the Queen's distress as having been just chance. Now, this is the first break with canon that got my attention and why I think someone other than McCaffrey had a hand in writing this thing. You may recall, that Zara felt the pain of the Queen from several light years away, and when she got close, she immediately understood that she was freezing to death. The continuity error here is a step beyond the shoddily written intro where Afra is listed as being Damia's brother, for Pete's sake. This is just a straight cop out, and if they didn't want to write any more, they would have been better off not bothering at all. Of course, there's no money in that, is there?2.The other children and their significant others go from one planet to the other, hypothesizing and theorizing about Hiver biology, when what the reader wants to know is: What happened to so and so --? And it just goes on and on, along with the ridiculous subplot of developing birth control methods for the `Dinis. The final answer of how to talk with the Hivers is very contrived andgoes against earlier canon. Uh, why weren't the pheromones detected in Damia's Children when Zara pulled her `antic'? Why didn't the Queen react to Zara's pheromones? You might remember she stank so badly, she was rushed into the showers, and yet in the Tower and Hive, the mere hint of garlic caused a Hiver to react to cleanse the air. It's all just nonsense. Forget writing the Biology textbook for the 24th century, this story was always about the PEOPLE and I think the communication thing with the Hivers could have been so much more interesting . . . as in, what if they are Telepathic in some new way? That would have explained why Zara could hear her all those light years away and the instantaneous communication from the Queen to her workers.Pheromones take time, because they require air. And air, even in a hurricane, can only go so fast.3. Damia's children. To the last man (or woman) they are absolutely perfect. They don't gripe about working full time jobs from the time they are 12 or so and don't seem to want to rebel against their grandfather's unceasing demands as well as his schemes to turn them all into baby factories. They don't seem to mind being bred like cattle. In addition, we are left at the end of the book knowing that they will all be searching for Hiver worlds forever on board navy vessels in order to drop the pheromones on them. For years and years and years. And I thought my job was bad.4. No interesting characters. The one possibility, Vagrian, is given more time in the book than the Rowan or Damia but turned out to be a red herring. Why did they bring in this character? He adds nothing to the story and once he is mind-fixed, has no other purpose. Why did McCaffrey introduce us to him, if he doesn't do anything important? He doesn't even seduce one of her available daughters, so there's no reason for him to be in the story. You begin to wonder if there wasn't more planned for that character McCaffrey(or Todd) just lost steam and tied it all up.5. That's yet another problem. Too many pat answers, the most glaring of which is the Laria/Kincaid relationship. Now, why go to all the trouble to reinforce that the man is gay in the other books, and then just have him forget all that and become straight just for her.Because he loves her? It doesn't work that way. So now, we are left with their very implausible relationship and of course her entry into the halls of baby making. How about a female Talent that -gasp!- chooses not to have ANY babies! Now that might be a good story.So, we are finally left with an incomplete and hurried story, up to an including the Final Solution for the Buggers -I mean Hivers.(Wouldn't want Orson Scott Card to get mad or anything.) What made these books so great was the concept of Talent combined with the interesting personalities. From Rhyssa Owen to Damia, even Jeff Raven before his character got ruined. It would have been better not to end it like this, but leave it with the open ended finale in Lyon's Pride.

More and more the Hivers need to be confined to their planets so that no one is killed or harmed but how to do that without killing them off? It takes a few specialists awhile to come to the conclusion that pheromones have much to do with keeping them docile. Now any planet that is found gets sprayed with the special treatment of pheromones to keep them docile.Now that the Mrdini are not having to go into battle with the Hivers they are having a population problem and need help with that and one of Damia’s children Zara, is helping to solve the problem. She has also learned that it’s to do with some of the special ingredients that are used when the Dinis are hibernating that cause them to create another Dini. Simple but so hard for other Dinis to accept that it must be changed after so many years of doing same thing to change for the better.So many things can be simple and yet can be hard at the same time as change is difficult but if no change then how do you grow?

When I was a a kid, I was way above my grade level for reading and always ended up bored by the library selection in my school. My mom in her irritation with me threw The Rowan at me and told me to have at it. To this day the Tower and Hive series is still my favorite series that I read time and again, along with the many other Anne McCaffrey series I ended up reading afterwards. I started off with the paper backs my mom gave me, and then eventually got them all in hard back. I was so excited to finally be able to buy these for my kindle so I can have my piece of sentiment with me always.The only downside here is that for some reason we have the whole series on Kindle, except for the first in the series?Not sure what's going on Penguin Group (USA) LLC , but I would really like to buy the first one so my kindle collection is complete, right along with my paper back and hardback versions of the series!

I enjoy all of Anne McCaffrey's books. Although "The Tower and The Hive" mainly takes place on exploratory spaceships I enjoy reading the "whole" story. I read this book in hardcover when it was first published ... my copy is even supposed to be signed by the author(!)...I recently bought the kindle edition so I could read it anyplace I had my phone and time on my hands. This is probably the third time I've read it. I find it relaxing to read a favorite book. I know when it's a good stopping point and I already know what happens so I don't stay up until 2 am trying to finish it... I am amazed at all the names, descriptions, and occupations a writer must create and track when they create a fictional world!

I enjoyed this series but this particular book was very disjointed it lept around from people ans places. It didn't seem as "driven" as the others.

McCaffrey has developed characters over several books. They don't grow. The arrogance of the talented is prominent. The speech and actions of the supporting cast is reminiceant of 18th century England. It is a common theme in her books.She does make a valid point about does a society have the right to exterminate another society when there are alternatives.Earths history is replete with this very situation. The uestion is still not answered, in the book and in our society. That said it is a book that will hold the reader's interest. well crafted as you would expect from this author.

I have re read this series at least 4 times over the last 30 years and it is just as good each time I read it!

I recently for the first time in 10 or more years, re-read this series as part of a nostalgia/comfort read.I enjoyed the series a lot - despite it not aging well in many ways. It still holds a special place in my heart as it was one of the series that really got me stuck into scifi and fantasy fiction.This book however is probably the weakest of the lot - and is also the last book in the series.It really felt like there was a lot of further world building here - but no actual story of worth. The little plot contained being very much repetitive and lacking.Which is a shame, because this is one of my favourite Anne McCaffrey series.The book is definitely a product of it's time (when it was written) and although I love it so much - would definitely NOT reccomend it to new and younger readers, unless they are looking to deliberately explore older writing. Definitely a book for fans of Anne Mccaffrey only.(There is also the "questionable" decision to pair up a gay guy with a straight girl and 'Dream Away the Gay!')Note: Amazon insists this series has 6 books - it does not, it only has 5. (But there is a prequel trilogy available - To Ride Pegasus, Pegasus In Flight and Pegasus In Space)

Of all Anne McCaffrey's books, the "Talent" ones (starting with Pegasus..) competed with the Pern Trilogy, Dragonflight et al, for my favourites, BUT her quality seems to be fluctuating wildly these days.The Talent series is comparable to the Pern series. I re-read The White Dragon, and immediately followed that with Renegades of Pern, which was ghastly - turgid verbosity. I was never able to shake off the image of Anne sat in front of her PC writing Renegades with a big black cloud of "contractually obligated to churn out X Pern a year" depression over her head. Then she wrote "all the weyrs" and the magic was back (Skies was ok too, and I liked Todd McCaffrey's sole Pernese effort).The same thing happened with TT&TH series. Part of the problem is with McCaffrey's proofreader, who wants firing. Leaving aside the blooper that gave us an incestuous relationship by referring to Afra Lyon as Damia's brother not husband, there was also that in The Rowan which gave Rowan parents with entirely different names and occupations barely 10 pages apart. But I did enjoy The Rowan, and Damia, though I felt she got some unfair stick - Rowan and Jeff Raven were simply too career obsessed and selfish to have children at that time and poor Damia was merely unfortunate enough to be a normal baby after they lucked out with 2 "starkids" in Jeran and Cera. (Given Our Author is a mother of 3, one wonders about this portrayal of Damia as a "problem" when she was a perfectly ordinary baby).I also enjoyed Damia's Children and Lyon's Pride to a certain extent, though again the villain(s) was weak - Sedalla nearly kills Isthian yet gets taken out easily. Likewise when Rojer's Mrdini are murdered by the rogue General, he teleports himself into hiding in anguish, and yet not one of his powerful family of telepaths notices? Or hears his grief? Sorry, but if I were Laria/Thian/Zara and heard my brother mentally scream in anguish I'd have been on that spaceship kicking Dini posterior if I had to teleport across the known galaxy without any "gestalt" backup to do it. of course, the biggest flaw was Dano Kincaid, a relentlessly homosexual politically correct character, who suddenly does a 180 into Laria's lover. Again, I couldn't shake the image of Anne getting to the last chapter and suddenly realising she needed a Love Interest and not being bothered to rewrite the novel properly as she should.The Tower and The Hive, which I was really looking forward to, has exactly the same problems. Its about the Talents, but, like the most recent "Pegasus" novel, it reads in some places like a High School "dumbed down" textbook on science - and it's not really a coherent narrative, more an anthology/series of vignettes as if McCaffrey had a list of "plot threads" she needed to tie up to finish the series that she just ticked off the list once she'd written a few pages for each. Afra Lyon, who had to leave Capella and his gentle sister Goswina behind because he realised their "Methody" ways were too restrictive, is in TH&TH an interfering Methody father who puts up no resistance to Jeff Raven, who in TH&TH is, bluntly, a sexist bully wanting to turn his children into breeding cattle - a complete reversal of character from the original young, handsome rebel. The Rowan, the tough, sarcastic heroine of the first two books who would never win any mother of the year prizes (remember, she insensitively farmed out her 5 children, Jeran, Cera, Damia, Larak and Ezro onto her mother-in-law Isthia Raven, who had recently lost her husband Josh, several of her 12 children and grandchildren in the first ever Hiver attack) is now a submissive, adoring matron to Jeff's dynastic-ambition obsessed boor.All 8 of the Lyon kids, plus their cousins (Jeran, Cera and Ezro having churned out dozens of offspring to go with murdered Larak's posthumous son), are slavishly happy to kowtow to Jeff Raven's baby conveyor belt plan to totally dominate Talents forever (and what happened to the powerful Reidinger family?).The siblings also appear to have none of the normal sibling love for each other or simple pleasure in being with each other - Thian is particularly cold and humourless as the first Naval Prime. The chief villain fades away and then turns white hat, Dano Kincaid gives Laria an insipid, "I'll love you as much as my sexuality allows", at which point any female with the slightest hint of spine would have given him the heave, preferably helped by a sharp-toed stilletto shoe to the ass's ass.To be honest, given the character reversals and changes, I have to wonder whether this novel was written by Anne McCaffrey at all or whether it was knocked up to meet a contractual obligation by her son Todd who contented himself with getting the "cliff notes" from mum and winged it from there.Given all the cash Ms McCaffrey had made from her writing, if she really can't find that spark that gave us the gems that are The Rowan and The White Dragon, then I would suggest it be better if she retired. Either that or write Number 6 in the Talent series, in which: Laria gets a backbone and dumps Dano when she meets (a possibly alien?) real male with some testosterone, Rojer teaches his brother Thian and his family about showing affection and care for your siblings (possibly by attempting suicide when nobody realises he's depressed?) Rowan gets her personality back, Jeff Raven apologises for turning sexist, and one of the Raven kids decides against becoming a baby making machine. Since I'm a writer whose hobby is fan-fiction writing, I may have to fix all the above mistakes myself, but why should I have to? I suggest Ms McCaffrey puts her imagination and her writing on a strict diet of David Eddings and Lois McMaster Bujold, with an exercise regime of Christine Feehan and Suzanne Brockmann and Chris Stasheff before she writes her next book, because quite frankly at the moment her imagination is obviously a McFood munching couch potato grown flabby and out of condition from long-term commercial success which means it hasn't had to make an effort.

The final book of the Tower and the Hive series is another epic fantasy that you will not want to put down. We must now wait at bated breath for the next series continue magnificent author.

I have paper copies of the whole series I have re-read them so many times they are doing apart. I was delighted when they came out as kindle versions

Good read, fun Kindle book