Description:

From Publishers Weekly

The delightful characters and arcane world-building in Foster's latest Flinx novel (Flinx in Flux, etc.) should thrill the author's fans. While Foster's plotting lacks subtlety?most readers will be a step or three ahead of the characters?the ever more improbable predicaments in which interstellar adventurer Philip Flinx and his pet minidragon, Pip, find themselves prove invariably engaging. Events become especially strange when Flinx, fleeing a shady businessman who insists on buying Pip, explores an unnamed jungle world, quickly discovering that the planet's ecology is intensely interdependent. The few humans who long ago emigrated there survive by their wits and through the aid of the fascinating furcots, whose symbiotic relationship with the humans is, unfortunately, more pondered than explained. The planet and its various indigenous defenses prove useful to Flinx as he, Pip and several locals are pursued not only by the ruthless businessman but also by factions from previous books in the series, such as the ruthless AAnn. While the main cosmological discussion here?involving the possibility of a physical manifestation of evil?seems to exist mainly to set up a sequel, the joie de vivre with which Foster approaches each of Flinx's quandaries results in a robust space adventure.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

The spawn of sophisticated alien bioengineering experiments, Foster's series hero Philip Lynx--Flinx for short--is 20 in his seventh adventure, and his empathic abilities and poison-spitting pet snake, Pip, continue to land him in trouble. Touring the planet Samstead, Flinx crosses paths with a bullying aristocrat who insists on acquiring Pip for his menagerie. Using his own precocious wits as well as Pip's deadly fighting prowess, Flinx narrowly escapes to the safety of his orbiting spaceship and flees into uncharted space. He makes a haphazard landing on an unknown world almost completely enveloped by luxuriant rain forest and forges a bond there with the human descendants of a lost expedition. He adapts to the marvels of his new environment until his persistent enemy catches up with him. The prodigiously productive Foster has honed his narrative style until it is so consistently absorbing that newcomers to the Flinx saga will search out earlier installments, and both they and seasoned fans will be gratified by Foster's hints of more to come. Carl Hays