I finished Colors of Chaos the other day; it’s the third and final book in the Weapons of Chaos trilogy by Robert E. Vardeman, and after it’s all over I have a great appreciation for this series. I very nearly wrote about each book in turn, but decided that it would be best to roll them all into one larger post. Not only because each book is short (about 200 pages), but also because when my choice came down to whether I wanted to read the next book or write about the one I just finished, my choice always ended up being “read the next book”.

That being said, now that I’m done with the series, here’s what I have to say:

In some ways Michael Ralston, the main character of the Weapons of Chaos series, is too lawful for his own good. I find this to be an interesting contrast to the main subject of the series – that being a weapon designed for the explicit purpose of causing chaos (more on this later). Ralston is an archeology professor at the University of Illum on Nova Terra – the first planet colonized (after the human race nuked themselves off of Earth). He teaches classes, does research, and usually gets stuck with the second-rate digs if only because he’s not the popular professor on campus.

While exploring one such dig on Alpha 3, Ralston and his troupe of graduate students finds that the local (now dead) civilization had developed a telepathic projector – a device capable of projecting the thoughts and emotions of it’s creator to whoever was using the device. Through the telepathic projector, Ralston first learned of the chaos device, a comet-sized device that passed through the system many years ago and caused rampant genetic mutations, epilepsy, unpredictable and violent weather, and finally social uprising – eventually causing the collapse of the civilization. Also, as the physicists along for the expedition would find, the device changed the physical reactions involved in solar fusion and would cause the sun to go nova prematurely.

As Dr. Ralston chases the chaos device around the galaxy, his popularity declines while the popularity of those he takes with him skyrockets. By the end of the series, Ralston was less popular than chopped liver (papers rejected without being read, an exile in his own field, forced into sabbatical) while everyone else in his crew was wildly popular (people begging them for publications, throwing money at them for further expeditions, and handing them research positions at any college they could want). However, in the end, Ralston’s friends put together one more expedition to find the chaos device.

Though their goal was to find it and learn from it, they also recognized the danger of such knowledge, and sought also to keep such knowledge from those who would use it for war. An interesting backdrop for the book, was a war between two alien races, and, as such, keeping the knowledge of the chaos device away from both sides was a particular challenge (especially in the last book). However, in the end, they decide not to publish their results, and instead create a foundation dedicated to studying the chaos device and its equations and using that knowledge to design and patent devices using that technology.

Overall, I really liked nearly every element of this book: the driving plot to find, learn from, and ultimately disable the chaos device; the setting of an alien war happening right on our doorstep; and the characters, each growing and changing though oftentimes remaining stubborn in their principles. For me, it gave the world much of the richness I associate with our own, even if the science was a little out of date (though, that’s one of the things I actually love about old sci-fi.