Vigilant (novel)

Vigilant is a science fiction novel written by the Canadian author James Alan Gardner, published in 1999 by HarperCollins Publishers under its various imprints. The book is the third volume in Gardner's "League of Peoples" series, after Expendable (1997) and Commitment Hour (1998).

Vigilant relies on the same conceptual background and backstory as all of the novels in the series. By the middle of the 25th century, humanity is integrated into a pan-galactic civilization called the League of Peoples, dominated by species of intelligent life evolved far beyond the human level. The benefits of this association are major advanced technologies, including effective interstellar travel, genetic engineering, nanotechnology, and terraforming; the price is that humanity obey the League's one cardinal rule, to refrain from fatal violence against other sentient beings. Most of humanity has accepted this bargain: a society calling itself the Technocracy, based on a terraformed New Earth and operating through a navy-like space organization called the Outward Fleet, has spread over a range of planets and star systems.

In a prefatory note titled "The Structure of the Technocracy," Gardner specifies that the Technocracy consists of:

Faye Smallwood is an inhabitant of a colony planet named Demoth. The vast majority of the inhabitants of Demoth belong to a race or species called the Oolom; they are a genetically-engineered offshoot of the Divians, an alien species that features in several novels in the series. The Oolom were engineered to function like the flying squirrels of Earth: with lightweight bodies and long flaps of skin descending from their arms, they can glide through the air and rise on warm thermal currents. Demoth is also occupied by about half a million humans, who have settled on the planet over the previous five decades to run the mining operations. (The air-loving Oolom react negatively to underground environments, and the ore deposits are now too diffuse for robot mining.)

When Faye Smallwood was fifteen years old, the Oolom population was devastated by a contagious disease called pteromic paralysis; the majority of the population died lingering deaths, before a cure was discovered by Dr. Henry Smallwood, Faye's father. A hero to the Oolom, Dr. Smallwood lived to enjoy that status for only a year, before he died in a mining accident. His daughter had to grow up through a troubled adolescence, which she eventually overcame by entering into a group marriage with seven other people.