Bagging a Yeti in the Himalayas is just one of the things that has made Lansing a legend in the Orion Guild. He’s a true hunter with all the necessary skills: tracking, stalking, and a crack shot. He respects his kills. And he won’t hunt men. He’s the symbol of the Guild.

But not everyone likes the Guild and its fussy, stodgy ways: no post-1953 firearms are used in their hunts nor much other modern technology. And they forbid their members to hunt men.

That’s why the upstart hunting organization RifleHire has targeted the Guild, and Lansing in particular, for destruction.

Lansing takes charge of the Orion Guild’s contract to purge a herd of brindles, animals highly prized for their aphrodisiac meat and that can only be raised on Wildernesse. That happens to be the home planet of Lansing before he was forced into exile after his parents were wrongly accused of trying to undercut the government’s brindle meat monopoly.

But that’s not the only reunion taking place. One-armed Bledsoe is waiting there to hunt brindle too and disgrace Lansing after the latter forced him out of the Guild for illegally hunting men. A sadist, a proud man of many impoverishing vices, and really only skilled at shooting – preferably slow death shots rather than Lansing’s quick kills. In tow is Cass, a weird dog-woman chimera there to do the hunting and stalking and mundane camp duties for Bledsoe.

Overseeing Bledsoe’s RifleHire audition is Rose, a nymphomaniac armorer who just happens to be Lansing’s cousin and who has delusions of reuniting with Lansing after he sexually spurned her.

Lansing’s crew includes Wren, an ex-football player who isn’t taken seriously as a hunter. That’s why he issues an official challenge to Lansing as to who can kill the most brindles. And there’s Nadia a twenty-something trapped in a body that’s thirteen years old. She participated in the first High Hunt as the Orion Guild’s attempted assassination of Bledsoe was dubbed. She longs for the sexual thrill of killing something intelligent: a human.
And that’s not even listing the misfits rom RifleHire, a thuggish outfit that practices gang rape initiations.

There are several aesthetics a science fiction story can use: attempted prediction and realistic extrapolation, satire, or contrived setups to provide the metaphors or adventure plots an author wants. Connell uses the latter. So we get a too familiar future with Spam meat and the IFL (presumably the Interstellar or Interplanetary Football League) Wren played for. Nadia describes her body as being like a “bobby-soxer”. There are few technological extrapolations apart from the Longliner starships that ply the spaceways and the firearms RifleHire uses
.
Instead, Connell put his effort into the complex ecosystem of Wildernesse and the brindles as well as the details (there are a lot of flashbacks in this novel) of Lansing’s other hunts of alien creatures.

Sometimes the Quentin Tarrantino-ish dialogue isn’t distinctive enough for each character. Almost every character has some sort of physical problem. And quite a few also have psychological problems, some, frankly, not very believable.

I was a bit bored with it on the first reading until about the three-quarters mark when it really picked up, and Lansing reveals unexpected depths.
The story is complete though Connell says he is working on a sequel. I suspect some of the (surviving) RifleHire characters will show up in it.
Still, I would be curious about such a sequel.

Recommended if you like hunting stories, thugs, and lots of gunplay.

[Review copy supplied by the author.] ( )

I received "High Hunt" through librarything.com.

"High Hunt" is an excellent premise but by the time I finished I had decided that Adam Connell is a lazy writer and possibly a horrid person.

I don't know how many LT members are hunters, especially professional hunters, but my family hunts, raises championship hunting dogs, and a close friend is a professional hunting guide. I checked with them and find, as I suspected, that the whole scenario of the Orion Guild and their rivals RifleHire is an incoherent mess.

The Orion Guild, a group of professional animal hunters, is the center of the novel, and this is a very good plot device indeed. Orion holds a traditional view of hunting with an emphasis on correct hunting practice. Guild members may not take contracts to hunt humans. The Guild is much older and more famous than their rival RifleHire. Orion and RifleHire compete for interplanetary contracts to hunt animals but RifleHire may also take contracts to hunt humans.

RifleHire rejects the strictures that define Orion Guild and seems to be made up largely of people who either failed to meet the Guild's membership standards or who are fixated on hunting humans. Somehow, and I don't understand why, the broader range of RifleHire skills does not translate into an economic advantage and the rivalry for animal hunts remains strong.

The problems with the book can be divided into two sets: the poor imagining of Orion, and the illogic of character action. The plot itself is quite good and in better hands this book might have been a real gem.

As it is presented, Orion is fixated on weaponry and has elaborate rules about what armament members are allowed and forbidden to use. In particular, no gun is allowed that has been manufactured since 1953. Many problems here. As far as I can tell, and the book gives no help, 1953 was an important year for many things – the first Corvette, the movie Shane, polio vaccine, the end of the Korean War – but nothing particular for personal armament. Winchester made some important changes to its bolt-action guns in 1964 but nothing comes to mind for 1953.

Guns were invented long ago and the guns of today are direct descendents of the blunderbuss and matchlock. What has changed is not so much gun design but the quality of materials and machining techniques. Our steel is stronger and our lathes more precise. Better manufacturing yields more powerful, more accurate weapons. The chemistry of gunpowder has evolved, but the guns have not, except that more strength in one is echoed in more strength in the other. If Orion needs an early cutoff date, a plot device I think is silly, 1900 would work just as well as 1953. The rifles Orion allows were designed in the second half of the 1800s for war and hunting.

And why a restriction on manufacturing date, not design date? Steel ages and get brittle, as anyone who owns an old car knows, and while we aren't given a time cue for the novel, FTL transport is not around the corner. These weapons are ancient. And, if we are going to be picky about manufacturing date, isn't it "manufacturing" for the Guild to modify the firing capacity of the ancient Marlins they issue to members (not to mention that this detail has no relevance to this plot)? And, for one previous hunt mentioned in passing, somehow these 1953 weapons were supposed to work undersea. No idea what that was about.

Then there is body armor. Everyone wears body armor but Lansing's body armor is far better than the others because it was made by Slocum, a contemporary master gunsmith. This armor is allowed by Orion because it uses old technology. Huh? A quick look at transistor history puts the definitive inventions after 1953. The microcircuitry and controllers for this wonderful suit could not be built even now.

Knives. Orion prescribes what kind of knife members carry. WTF? Knives have been around for ages and who are you to tell me what kind of knife best fits my hand? Guild approved wristwatches? Nutso.

Oh yeah, Orion members are denied access to modern health care, even for exotic diseases they pick up on assignment. Modern diagnostics are OK, just not modern treatment, except for some kind of bionic arm that never got explained.

But does Orion dispatch hunters across the galaxy in rowboats? Hell no. Rocket ships, ration cubes, microweight thermal blankets (read about the equipment Hillary and Norgay used on Everest in 1953 and see if you want to carry it), titanium scabbards, and exotic ammo are just fine.

Orion manufactures its own ammo and seems to have allowed changes to ammo specs. Thus we have "rampage rounds" that have a range far longer than the WWII mortar rounds from which they are derived. "Anvil rounds" are a variation on less-than-lethal rounds such as the beanbag and rubber ammo of today but in 1953 the non-lethal was rock salt. "Firestarter rounds" are modified regular rounds and so pass the age test. RifleHire carries some specialized rounds but nothing even close to SF standbys.

So here we have pages and pages of discussion about Guild technical fixations that do not follow internal logic and have little bearing on the plot, but we have no mention of the aspects of true hunting that Orion must surely practice.

Hunting, for serious practitioners, is a spiritual activity, not a mechanical one. The weapon is the mechanism of the kill, not of the hunt. A hunt is a competition between human and animal and is constrained by skill and ritual on the part of the human and skill on the part of the animal. Correct hunters do not manipulate the hunt by using improper weapons or manufactured scenarios. Where I come from young men (usually men) still run down deer on foot, killing them with a knife or perhaps only touching them with their hands. The most worthwhile hunts risk the hunter's life too.

Hunting ritual is the basis for Orion's moral strength, but Connell ignores it entirely in the pursuit of weapons rules, to the point that the Orion team doesn't mention even the most fundamental hunting ideals. There is no discussion of how to honor the diseased animals they must kill so quickly, no attention to turning carcasses to face the rising sun, avoiding looking them in the eye. No quick thanks to the animal for giving its life – even Avatar was better than this.

I could go on but this essay is getting long so I will start wrapping it up.

- Of the 7 central humans, only Lansing and Bledsoe (and maybe Herk, but he hardly counts) did their homework on the planet and the animals and came properly prepared.
- The other hunters not only did not do their homework, they came ill-prepared for hunting anywhere. Wrong shoes. Wrong insect repellant. No menstrual suppression. Untried weapons. Other goofy stuff that belies their professional status.
- Orion makes its living off these hunts and needs the contract payment badly. Why partner Lansing with idiots? Why would Orion not ensure that the team learned the information about the flora, fauna and culture of Wildernesse and issue them the equipment they would need for a successful hunt?
- The biologists of Wildernesse have banned persons who have been inside the preserve with the diseased brindles from ever visiting the planet again, but are moving non-diseased brindles onto the preserve even as the hunt concludes.
- What do brindles eat? If they are carnivorous, as is suggested in a few places, what animal do they feed on?
- Bledsoe uses Cass, a "feral human," as his gundog. What kind of reverse evolution would give a human a tracking nose? We are sight hunters.
- What is the point of giving Herk the ability to control canids with his mind? It's a useful skill that could be worked into another book, but Herk dies so why bother?

Now to Mr. Connell. The book does not have characters, only cardboard cutouts, but what we do learn of the cast is damning. Lansing, the protagonist, is patterned on Mike Vronsky in "The Deerhunter." Silent. Precise. Prepared. And like Vronsky, Lansing is not challenged or changed by events. He marches through the book like a mechanical man and is about as interesting. The other cast members are simply dreadful people. The women are cruelly portrayed, especially Rose, and the men, except perhaps Herk, who doesn't matter, are depraved. RifleHire's initiation is violent and degrading. Bledsoe's treatment of Cass is unspeakable. I am not going to bother with Mr. Connell's other books but if you do, beware egregious misogyny and vile behavior. ( )