Hunter’s Run

A new benchmark in modern SF. A sharp, clever, funny morality tale that answers the biggest question of all: what makes us human?In a fight outside a bar Ramon Espejo kills a man. Next day, all hell breaks loose. The dead man was a big shot, a diplomat on a mission to the out-world of São Paulo. Ramon goes on the run, heading north toward unexplored territory, land so far only glimpsed from orbit during the first colony surveys.Ramon has gone from being nothing in the hills of Mexico to being nothing on São Paulo. He makes a bare living prospecting for minerals. Maybe God meant him to be poor, or he wouldn't have made him so mean. He can't even remember why he killed the European, only the drinking, and the rage that followed.Better to be alone in the wild landscape … off the map, beyond law and civilization. Each trip out he's sure will be the big one that'll make him rich. This one, too.Instead he finds something else, something terrifying. Or rather, it finds him, and uses him: as humans are used by species more intelligent than themselves. But Ramon Espejo is about to prove what a man is capable of. Ramon is about to demonstrate what it is to be human; to be angry, intelligent and alive. And he is about to discover his function in the broad flow of the universe. And why it was he killed the diplomat in the first place…George R.R. Martin's book 'Fire and Blood' was a Sunday Times bestseller w/c 2022-10-24.

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Martin (Song of Ice and Fire series), Dozois (Strange Days) and Abraham (A Shadow in Summer) revisit classic themes of exploration, exploitation and what it means to be human in this gritty SF adventure. Humanity has finally reached the stars, only to find that all the best spots have been claimed by other races—the Silver Enye, Turu, Cian and others. Human colonists serve as world-building crash-test dummies, dropped onto empty planets deemed too dangerous or inconvenient for other races, to pave over whatever marvels and threats evolution had put there. On the misbegotten colony planet of São Paulo, ore prospector Ramon Espejo has no illusions, especially about how the Enye view humanity. Then Ramon murders the wrong man in a drunken fight and takes off into the wastelands to avoid the Enye authorities. Once in the outback, he discovers he's not the only one trying to hide from the Enye—and that the deadly cat-lizards called chupacabras are far from the worst dangers on São Paulo. This tightly written novel, with its memorable protagonist and intriguing extrapolation, delivers on all levels. (Jan.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Bookmarks Magazine

In music, supergroups of established artists are rarely greater than the sum of their parts. The same often goes for science fiction, but critics agreed that these three authors beat the trend by producing a tight, consistent novel. Whether because of Martin’s decades of collaborative work, Dozois’s long career as an editor, or Abraham’s fresh prose style, every reviewer said the book seemed as if it were written by one person. The only complaint came from reviewers who had read an earlier, novella-length version of the story; they felt that expanding the story enriched it somewhat, but not by much. While it would be hard to match Hunter’s Run with any of these authors’ previous works, it can certainly be called a successful experimentâ€"and a compelling SF novel.Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

About the Author

George R. R. Martin is the perennial New York Times bestselling author of the epic, critically acclaimed, and widely popular fantasy series Song of Fire and Ice.

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