I’ve completely blanked on the title and author of this book I picked up at a used book store sometime around 1983, so it was probably published 3-5 years before that. Help me Straight Dope, you’re my only hope.
The title of the collection is “The ________ Trilogy,” collecting all three books in the ________ series for the first time. (!)
Major plot points -
In the first book a human is captured by first-contact aliens with a huge superiority complex, who I think give their name to the trilogy title. They keep him in a cell and try to get him to breed by throwing lobotomized females in with him, but he’s too honorable to partake. He escapes by noticing that his waste and inorganics pass through the floor, so he merely learns to stop his heartbeat so that he too passes through the floor.
In the second book there’s a great deal of learning about what dicks the aliens are as our hero travels around the galaxy, until in the third book we find out that humans carry one half of the DNA needed to reconstitute a race of super beings that split themselves in two to survive some radiation event millions of years ago. Our hero mates with some weird sexy alien to recreate the ancient alien babies. Finally we learn that the titular aliens who have been such jerks the whole time were really the pets of the newly returned super race back in the day and have been trying to stop their return.
There were a few stories, besides the three books, including The Learning of eeshta.
overall, i was disappointed in the series. Cage a Man, the first, was pretty good and had one interesting psychological twist that made it worthwhile. "The Learning of Eeshta, which could easily have been incorporated into the book, was good as well. The other books were pretty forgettable. It’s one of those series that has what I consider a big fundamental flaw – the Aliens are Technologically Superior to Us, but we Beat them in a War. It almost always bothers me when this happens, because it usually makes no sense*. The explanations given for it are usually pretty lame. In this ccsase, it was the common one that the Aliens have stopped creating and innovating, so us Earth guys could innovate past them. It doesn’t help that the reason for this is a twist in one of the later books.
*Harry Turtledove is one of the few who could pul it off, in his World War series.
I’m not sure that’s a fair criticism, or even a fair characterization.
The Demu were defeated, not by humans with their inferior technology, but by humans with stolen Demu technology and, more importantly, by the contributions of the alien confederation that had good enough tech to have kicked the stuffing out of the Demu long ago, if only they’d known where they were. The Demu operated like pirates, and it took the escape by Barton and his companions, and Barton’s nearly psychopathic obsession with wiping out the Demu, to put their allies on the track. Remember, the Demu were using stolen tech themselves, weren’t very numerous, and weren’t really that bright, Eeshta aside.
