Tuf Voyaging

Tuf Voyaging is an early work by ~George R. R. Martin~ of A Song of Ice and Fire fame, described by That Other Wiki as 'a darkly comic meditation on environmentalism and absolute power', which sounds about right. It stars the eponymous Haviland Tuf, a reclusive, phlegmatic, very eccentric chap with a great love of Spock Speak and a great distaste for his fellow man. He wants nothing more than to fly around the universe in his Cool Starship, The Ark, with his beloved cats and to make an honest living plying his trade.

There's a problem. A couple, actually. The Ark is a thirty-kilometer long seedship of the ancient Ecological Engineering Corps, with the power to clone and genetically engineer everything from plants to animals to bacteria. Tuf's trade is in ecological engineering, reshaping the ecologies of entire planets as his clients ask (for a modest fee). And the universe is not a nice place.

The seven stories in Tuf Voyaging chart Haviland Tuf's growth from a bumbling Spanner in the Works to a fully-fledged chessmaster with a burgeoning god complex. The stories are as follows:


 * The Plague Star: Origin Story. A Jerkass professor and her colleague theorise that the legendary Plague Star is a lost seedship of the E.E.C, and hire three mercenaries and a down-on-his-luck merchant by the name of Haviland Tuf to take them to it. Events... develop and ultimately lead to Tuf being the only "legitimate" owner of the ship.
 * Loaves and Fishes: Tuf takes his newly-acquired prize to the technologically advanced planet of S'uthlam to get alterations made to the ancient ship. S'uthlam has a few problems of its own, though - the S'uthlamese breed like rabbits, and the planet is on the brink of famine.
 * Guardians: A water world is being torn apart by sea monsters who are evolving and adapting at an insane rate. A psychic kitten provides a solution.
 * Second Helpings: Tuf returns to S'uthlam to pay off the first half of his debt and finds things have gotten worse.
 * A Beast for Norn: A man from the gladiatorial fighting obsessed planet of Lyronica approaches Tuf for an animal that can reverse his faction's ailing fortunes.
 * Call Him Moses: A terrorist has brought a colony to its knees by recreating the Biblical plagues, and Tuf is called in to beat him at his own game.
 * Manna from Heaven: Once again, Tuf returns to S'uthlam to pay off the final part of his debt. Things are worse than ever there though, and the newly-elected Expansionist government has an entire solar system on the brink of war. Tuf has to solve the problem of S'uthlam once and for all, whether they like it or not.

This fix-up novel contains examples of:

 * Always a Bigger Fish: Subverted. Wild Card Rica Dawnstar has Tuf outgunned and at her mercy, and refuses to believe him when he tries to point out the T. rex creeping up behind her. It looks like this trope will kick in...then it turns out she was toying with Tuf, and had the Phlebotinium to control the T. rex all along.
 * Apocalyptic Log: The prologue to "The Plague Star".
 * Artificial Gravity: Available via something called a "gravity grid". It's only installed in expensive top-line spacecraft, though, and less expensive craft make do with centrifugal rotation or nothing.
 * Beastly Bloodsports: "A Beast for Norn". The twelve Great Houses of the planet Lyronica use creatures native to their planet as combatants in gaming pits. Tuf disapproves of this cruelty to animals, so he sells each of the Houses an alien creature that annihilates the other Houses' creature in combat. He charges an ever-increasing outrageous fee for each creature, makes sure that each one has a serious side effect that will make it useless, and gives each House an extra creature that devastates its ecosystem. As a result, all of the Houses end up going bankrupt.
 * Bond One-Liner: From The Plague Star: "I had a gun, too."
 * The Chessmaster / Magnificent Bastard: Tuf starts off as a very clever man who others constatly underestimate. He plays off this advantage brilliantly, and by the end of the book evolves into a Magnificentbastard, holding sway over the lives of billions by controlling whether or not a massive interstellar war will erupt.
 * Crapsack Universe: The setting is shared with another Martin novel, The Dying of the Light, and the Universe is a pretty chaotic place. Ever since the Human-Hrangan war and the devastation that followed the Hrangan's desperate Last Stand, Earth has been a closed-off planet, along with its most prosperous and advanced colonies, like Prometheus. There is no centralized government, leaving individual colonies to degenerate into near-barbaric feudal-like societies, and the technologies behind genetic/ecological engineering and time manipulation are all but lost to everyone else, which makes the Ark a very sought-after treasure trove. Oh, and there were a bunch of AI rebellions at some point.
 * Deadpan Snarker: Tuf's never averse to slipping a bit of snark in via his usual Spock Speak.
 * Everything's Better with Dinosaurs: Cloned T-Rex.
 * Future Food Is Artificial: Meatbeasts are a carnivorous version; they're giant edible tumors.
 * Future Imperfect: It's not a big deal, but there are moments showing that history hasn't survived entirely intact. In "Second Helpings", Tolly Mune lists great lovers of legend - Romeo and Juliet, Samson and Delilah, Sodom and Gomorrah, Marx and Lenin. In "Call Him Moses", Tuf notes that there's a historical connection between the original Moses and the Noah after whose Ark his ship is named, but he's not sure what it is -- brothers, perhaps?
 * A God Am I: Having always had the power of a god through The Ark, Tuf slowly begins to wonder if he also has the responsibility and authority of one to boot. The question is left open, of course, and even him most questionable acts are born out of generally good intentions.
 * Hates Being Touched: Haviland Tuf.
 * Karmic Death: After killing Tuf's cat, Mushroom, Celise Waan bumps into a bunch of "hellkittens" - felines from a Death World. Who spit acid.
 * Kick the Dog: Celise Waan, the professor who hires Tuf, never got on with his cats. But cycling one out of the airlock into the Ark's disease-ridden air? Tuf later has to Mercy Kill the poor animal, prompting one of the only shows of emotion we ever get from him.
 * Living Lie Detector: Dax
 * Look Behind You!: Played with in "The Plague Star". When Tuf attempts to warn Rica Dawnstar that there's a ravenous T. rex sneaking up behind her, she tells him sternly that she's not going to fall for "the old there's-a-dinosaur-behind-you gambit" -- even though it's making enough noise that she must know it's there. It turns out she's perfectly aware that it's there, and also that she's in no danger from it.
 * Mini-Mecha: The Unquin battlesuit.
 * Oh Crap: Tuf has informed the S'uthlamese that he's installed a nuke that will destroy The Ark's "cell library," making the ship useless to them, if they're about to succeed in taking over. Tolly Mune, having acquired a Living Lie Detector of her own, calls his bluff on this, and Tuf admits that she's right. "You have found me out." And then her lie detector says that was a lie.
 * Pardon My Klingon: Some of the characters on S'uthlam are prone to cussing up a storm, but because of cultural differences the things that count as cusswords on S'uthlam are quite inoffensive to the reader.
 * Planet of Hats: Done in rather more detail than usual with S'uthlam. Their tendency to pop out babies at a ridiculous rate is tied in to everything: their main religion, the Church of Life Evolving, believes mankind can find divinity through procreating and evolution, calling someone an "abortion" is a dire insult and even the planet's technological expertise is tied in to number of geniuses the large population ends up producing.
 * Also done in less depth with Lyronica, where everything revolves around the pit fighting.
 * Psychic Powers: Tuf maintains that all cats have a touch of psi, and in the later stories he is accompanied at all times by a cat that has been engineered to be actively psychic, which functions as a Living Lie Detector and an early warning system for people planning to attack him. Also there's the telepathic Starfish Aliens in "Guardians", and the eponymous critter in "A Beast for Norn" that gains an advantage in fights by reading the intentions of its opponent.
 * Right-Hand-Cat: A succession of cats take this role for Tuf over the course of the series. The later ones, as Tuf becomes more adept with the seedship's tools, have a variety of useful abilities built in.
 * Sapient Ship: subverted, where the biological engineering warship Tuf 'inherits' as the last surviving member of a freelance salvage team is specifically NOT sentient, though it could have been made so; there is mention of other Earth warships with AI installed mutinying and/or fighting each other.
 * Sdrawkcab Name: S'uthlam, with the "th" resisting inversion.
 * Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness: Tuf's usual mode of speaking. Hell, the merchant ship he flew before he had The Ark was named The Cornucopia of Excellent Goods At Low Prices.
 * Shout-Out: As noted in Single Biome Planet below, the water world in "Guardians." Also, Tuf mentions a large, dark flying creature: "a Claremontine wind-rider, also called the ororo."
 * Single Biome Planet: Namor, an ocean world.
 * Space Amish: Moses and the Altruists.
 * Space Elevator: S'uthlam has one, connecting the orbital spaceport to the planet's surface. It's mentioned as a sign of the planet being highly advanced technologically.
 * Starbucks Skin Scale: Anittas in "The Plague Star" has "mocha-colored" skin.
 * Starfish Aliens: Are at the root of the problem in "Guardians".
 * Stock Dinosaurs: A cloned Tyrannosaurus Rex plays a key role in "The Plague Star".
 * The Stoic: Haviland Tuf is expressionless in face and voice. In moments of high emotion, he might blink. He smiles exactly once in the entire book, and that's more for effect than an expression of genuine emotion.
 * Take the Wheel: Haviland Tuf has Tolly Mune take the wheel while he concentrates on calming his favorite cat and keeping it from leaping into trouble.