The Last Dancer is a doozy of a novel: an over-the-top, ultratech sci-fi fantasy, it's so much fun to read that by the time you finish you hardly realize that the plot stopped making sense about 400 pages ago.

The book begins with a prologue that occurs 37,000 years in the past. The first chapter, set 15 years before the main plot line, ends with a tactical nuclear bomb levelling lower Manhattan in order to stop a team of telepaths from driving the city mad. I am not even going to try to adequately summarize the rest of the novel. Let's just say that a descendant of one of the nuked telepaths catches the attention of a 51,000-year-old rebel warrior from another planet; that she is assisted by yet another 51,000-year-old warrior and by a sentient AI initially modeled after her former lover, who fled the law by walking through a wall and then escaping to the asteroid belt; that she at one point joins American rebels intent on throwing off the oppressive regime of a French-run, frighteningly armed United Nations, in part by seizing orbital laser cannons with the help of brainwashed Japanese cyborgs; and that--oh, never mind.

In other words, The Last Dancer is space opera (albeit mostly ground based) on a massive scale. Like other, similar novels (e.g., Iain M. Banks's Culture series) the book is filled with memorable action scenes, such as the moment where one protagonist, fleeing for her life, sees hundreds of aircraft dropping from the sky amid nuclear artillery fire to deploy thousands of genetically modified cyborgs in the middle of a wartorn Los Angeles. The action never lets up: Moran writes well enough to maintain a breathless pace through nearly 600 pages of convoluted plotting.

Of course, the breakneck pace means that Moran quickly loses control over his plot. Moran does not quite have the effortless technical control that Banks has, though the spirit is there. For instance, when something happens, Moran tends to make everything happen, leading to confusing layers of action involving dozens of characters in different locations. Sub-chapter breaks occur abruptly; when Moran picks them up later there is always a small jolt of dislocation as the reader attempts to find his place again. The book ends with several plot threads still dangling, while others are unsatisfactorily tied up. Most importantly, the plot just stops making sense about 200 pages in because it's too complicated. And yet, somehow, that doesn't really matter.

The backstory is similarly confused. This is partly because it's so overwrought: as explained in the author's bio, Moran intends the Tales of the Continuing Time series (of which The Last Dancer is the fourth book) to "cover[] a time period from sometime [sic] before the Big Bang to roughly 12,000 years A.D. and [to] be about 33 volumes when finished." Although Moran doesn't go very far beyond 2076 in The Last Dancer he really does reference the time period shortly before the Big Bang, as well as the intervening billions of years of history. And yes, this backstory is important to the plot. How? I'm not entirely sure. Thankfully, the book is still fun even if you sometimes have no idea what Moran is talking about.

It's worth mentioning, for those who care about such things, that there is a small amount of racial stereotyping in this book. For instance, the leader of the UN's fearsome Peacekeeping Force seems to be Muslim (his name is Mohammed Vance), which buys into the "Arabs as fierce warriors" stereotype that also seems to have motivated the Fremen in Frank Herbert's Dune and Fedmahn Kassad in Dan Simmons's Hyperion. Also, there's a Zen master martial artist who is, naturally, Asian (Japanese, to be exact). Of course, the two other Zen master martial artists are the aforementioned 51,000-year-old extraterrestrial warriors, so perhaps there isn't anything to be worried about here.

It's also worth mentioning how weird it was for me to be reading this book while the war in Iraq was starting. The book largely concerns a distasteful United Nations, run by the distasteful French; it also concerns the United States acting unilaterally against the United Nations in order to overthrow a dictatorship amidst fear of terrorism and an international power struggle. Of course, the book inverts a lot of facts: in The Last Dancer, the United Nations is the dictator, Americans are the rebellious terrorists, and the French have both power and influence. Also, let's not forget the fact that the book also involves telepaths and genetically modified UN cyborg troops. But I never said that the parallels were perfect, just that they were eerie.

At any rate, if extravagant, operatic, and action-packed science fiction is your thing, you will love The Last Dancer despite its deep flaws. I, for one, will be on the lookout for the rest of Moran's unfortunately out-of-print books.

Copyright © 2003 Steven Wu