James Nicoll Reviews

Lee Killough’s 1980 The Monitor, the Miners, and the Shree is a standalone hard SF novel. 

Unlike the Galactic Union, the Sodality that has replaced the Union has a strict no-contact rule where pre-spaceflight worlds are concerned. Thus, when the Sodality discovered that there was a previously unnoticed low-tech species on planet Nira, they forced the Megeyn mining company to shut down operations on Nira and leave the native Shree to develop in isolation.

The Sodality likes to keep an eye on developing worlds. Once every five hundred years, the Department of Surveys and Charters (DSC) dispatches a team of scientists to secretly monitor the Shree. Newly minted monitor Chemel Krar is in charge of the latest team. It is her task to ensure that the scientists hired by DSC do not violate the no-contact rule while spying on the natives. 

The expedition goes wrong surprisingly quickly.

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1981’s Aventine is Lee Killough’s sole short-story collection to date. The stories share a common setting: Aventine, an artists community on a distant world. At least, that is how the inhabitants like to see themselves. The truth is darker. 

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1979’s The Doppelgänger Gambit, first book in the Brill and Maxwell series, was Lee Killough’s second novel [1]. A futuristic police procedural, it explores the question ​“how do you get away with murder in a world where the movements of every citizen are tracked?” It’s a cousin to novels like The Demolished Man. Killough isn’t as stylistically innovative as Bester, but her book held my interest. I have a small (and sadly, almost complete) collection of her works.

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Lee Killough may be comparatively obscure now but in the 1970s she was one of a cohort of hard SF writers discovered by Del Rey. Later on she turned to horror and what would have been called urban fantasy if she had written it 20 years later but it was her SF that I loved.

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