Childhood's End - Arthur C. Clarke

   1953; 218 pages.  New Author? : No.  Genres : 50’s Sci-Fi; Hard Science Fiction; First Contact.  Laurels: Retro Hugo Award for Best Novel in 2004 (nominated).  Overall Rating: 9/10.

 

    All in all, it’s not so bad being ruled over by this particular set of Galactic Invaders.

 

    Oh, when hordes of their spaceships suddenly appeared in the skies over the major cities of Earth, we knew we were no match for them.  But other than declaring all national borders to be null and void (“One World”, and all that), they’ve pretty much left us alone.

 

    They do require that all communication with them pass between our one designated representative, Rikki Stormgren, and their Overlord known as Karellen.  They meet on an Overlord spaceship because the aliens refuse to physically set foot (or paw, pod, tentacle, or whatever appendages they have) on our planet.  But the relations between those two emissaries is cordial.  One can’t help but wonder, though.

 

    When will the Overlords reveal their ultimate plans for us?

 

What’s To Like...

    Childhood’s End opens with a brief, 5-page Prologue wherein the 1950s United States and Russia react with shock to the realization that they’re no longer the only ones in the cosmos.  The rest of the book is divided into three parts:

    Part 1: Earth and the Overlords (5 years after the Overlords arrive)

    Part 2: The Golden Age

    Part 3: The Last Generation (100 years after the “time of Disney”)

 

    I liked the “Hard Science-Fiction” aspect of the storyline.  The Overlords may use advanced technology, but they still can’t go faster than the speed of Light.  And those traveling at almost the speed of Light age much more slowly than the rest of the universe's inhabitants.  Relativity: It’s the Law.

 

    It was also nice to read a “First Contact” tale where the extraterrestrials don’t make their entrance with lasers and phasers a-blazing.  For a change, they seek a peaceful coexistence, albeit one tailored to their set of rules.  They must have an ulterior motive for this, of course, but that’s a secret best kept hidden for now.

 

    Arthur C. Clarke also shows impressive prescience when describing the future world.  Giant computing machines become the norm, and humans are blessed with reliable oral contraceptives and infallible paternity tests.  Yet seances are still popular and I’m still waiting for the aircar to become our principal means of personal transportation.

 

    The ending is both logical and unexpected, and both heartwarming and sad.  Humans and Overlords find their proper place in the Cosmos, but neither group knows what’s in store for them next.

 

Ratings…
    Amazon: 4.4*/5, based on 13,844 ratings and 1,898 reviews.

    Goodreads: 4.12*/5, based on 164,727 ratings and 7,806 reviews.

 

Excerpts...

    “Karellen,” he said abruptly, “I’ll draft out the statement and send it up to you for approval.  But I reserve the right to continue pestering you, and if I see any opportunity, I’ll do my best to learn your secret.”

    “I’m perfectly well aware of that,” replied the Supervisor, with a slight chuckle.

    “And you don’t mind?”

    “Not in the least—though I draw the line at nuclear weapons, poison gas, or anything that might strain our friendship."  (pg. 55)

 

    It was One World.  The old names of the old countries were still used, but they were no more than convenient postal divisions.  There was no one on earth who could not speak English, who could not read, who was not in range of a television set, who could not visit the other side of the planet within twenty-four hours.

    Crime had practically vanished.  It had become both unnecessary and impossible.  When no one lacks anything, there is no point in stealing.  Moreover, all potential criminals knew there would be no escape from the surveillance of the Overlords.  In the early days of their rule, they had intervened so effectively on behalf of law and order that the lesson had never been forgotten.  (pg. 72)

 

“The planets you may one day possess.  But the stars are not for Man.”  (pg. 137)

    There was zero profanity in Childhood’s End, and zero adult situations.  The worst language gripe I can come up with is a single use of a racial epithet.

 

    The only typos I spotted were a couple of hyphenated words that shouldn’t have been (boy-friend/boyfriend, sight-seeing/sightseeing, co-operate/cooperate).  I have a feeling those hyphenation issues arose at the printing shop when the original typewritten manuscript was converted.  I thought I spotted a misspelling (kidnaped/kidnapped), but it turns out both those past tense spellings are acceptable.  English is a goofy language.

 

    A lot of Sci-Fi novels from the 1950s/60s don’t hold up too well over time, but I’m happy to say that Childhood’s End is an exception to this.  It is well-written, thought-provoking, entertaining, and frighteningly plausible.

 

    According to Wikipedia, the theme of Childhood’s End, transcendent evolution, is also used in Clarke’s 4-book Space Odyssey series, of which I’ve read the first two books.  It’s time to tackle the next book in that series.

 

    9 Stars.  One last thing.  At one point (pg. 61) 3-dimensional chess and checkers are compared, with the implication that the latter is child’s play relative to the former.  Well, I’ve played chess, albeit the 2-D variety, all my life, and on occasion have played checkers.  Folks, my comprehension of checkers is pathetic.

Daybreak 2250 A.D. - Andre Norton

   1952; 191 pages.  Alternate Titles: “Star Man’s Son” and “Star Man’s Son, 2250 AD”.  New Author? : No.  Genres : 50’s Sci-Fi; YA; post-apocalyptic.   Overall Rating: 8/10.

 

    Fors's father, Langdon, was a highly regarded Star Man.  He had roamed the ruined lands around the Eyrie extensively, drawn maps of it, and brought back precious loot.  And even though Langdon was now dead, it was natural to assume that Fors would follow in his father’s footsteps.

 

    But his mother was of an alien race, one could tell that just by looking at Fors.  Which made him a half-breed, a mutant.  And when it came time for the yearly Choosing ritual at the Star Hall, the Council’s opinion was that Fors’s genes were more important than his training or his father's fame.

 

    Five years Fors had been nominated to be a Star Man; five years he had been rejected.  Five years was the limit; a sixth nomination was forbidden.  Fors would be relegated to the status of a commoner, suitable for working in the fields.  Nothing more.  All because of his looks.  And there's nothing he can do about it.

    Is there?

 

What’s To Like...

    Andre Norton (real name: Alice Mary Norton, b. 1912, d. 2005) was a prolific and popular sci-fi/fantasy author; Daybreak 2250 AD is one of her early works.  We follow Fors as he travels into the ruins of a post-apocalyptic world with his companion cat, Lura (see cover image).  In a land where nuclear war has annihilated almost all of civilization, Fors encounters various beasts and humans, which at best, distrust any stranger passing through their territory, and at worst, want to kill and eat them.

 

    The target audience is YA boys, which was true of all sci-fi novels written in the 1950s.  Therefore there is lots of adventure here, and absolutely zero booze, drugs, adult situations, and/or cussing.  When the latter seems called for, Andre Norton delightfully resorts to phrases like “by the great horned lizard!” and “forest filth!”.

 

    In amongst all the exploring and adventuring, the author subtly weaves some keen insight about several serious themes.  The book was published in 1952, just seven years after the US dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  This introduced a new global dread: a massive, life-ending nuclear holocaust.  Andre Norton uses that scenario as the setting for Daybreak 2250 AD.  She also offers some provocative opinions, for that era, on racial bigotry (the southern tribespeople are dark-skinned) and feminism (one of the clans is led by a woman).  Plus, there is an overarching theme of the futility of war.  Pretty awesome for 1952!

 

    It was fun to comb through the ruins alongside Fors searching for long-lost gadgets and artifacts.  The rusted, derelict automobiles, both the nuclear-powered and the older gasoline-burning ones, are ignored; the technology for making their fuels has long been lost.  Store mannequins scared and mystified Fors because at first he thought they were petrified victims of the nuclear blasts.  OTOH, finding pencils, especially the colored ones, and a ream of paper, cause him to rejoice.  So do foodstuffs preserved in cans and jars that are still sealed.  Ordinary forks are also valuable finds.

    The ending is satisfying and heartwarming, albeit pretty straightforward and not very twisty.  Given several choices for a tribe that will accept him, and mutant though he is, Fors opts for the obvious one.  The book screams to be developed into a series chronicling Fors’s further adventures, but that has never happened.

 

Ratings…
    Amazon: 4.5*/5, based on 58 ratings and 34 reviews.

    Goodreads: 4.02*/5, based on 2,539 ratings and 163 reviews.

 

Excerpts...

    They might have forgotten about his night sight and too-keen hearing.  He could have concealed those as soon as he learned how wrong it was to be different.  But he could not hide the color of his close-cropped hair.  And that had damned him from the day his father had brought him here.  Other men had brown or black, or, at the worst, sunbleached yellow, covering their heads.  He had silver white, which showed to all men that he was a mutant, different from the rest of his clan.  Mutant!  Mutant!  (pg. 6)

 

    “Mountains—man made—that is what we see here.  But why did the Old Ones love to huddle together in such a fashion?  Did they fear their own magic so that they must live cheek to cheek with their kind lest it eat them up when it was loosed—as it did?  Well, they died of it in the end, poor Old Ones.  And now we have a better life—”

    “Do we?”  Fors kicked at the loose stone.  “They had such knowledge—we are groping in the dark for only crumbs of what they knew—"  (pg. 70)

 

“Only a fool tries to teach the otter to swim.”  (pg. 157)

    There’s very little to quibble about in Daybreak 2250 AD.  As mentioned, there is nothing even remotely R-rated here.  One reviewer felt that the storyline was anti-feminist because Fors chose not to accept the female leader’s offer to accept him into her tribe.  But this novel came out in 1952.  Feminism was not yet an issue back then.  Personally, I was impressed that it portrayed an army of men as being willing to have a woman lead them into battle.

 

    The big problem was with the editing.  Typos abounded: tained/tainted; mid-dile/middle, horrow/horror, scatered/scattered, and a host of others, numerous enough to be a distraction. But again, this book came out in 1952, when spellchecker and word processing programs were just a figment of the imagination.   So I’m forced to cut the editing staff some slack.

 

    Daybreak 2250 AD kept my interest from the start to finish, which was a bit of a surprise, since I am not part of the target audience.  The text did not seem “YA-ish” at all, and the action, if not particularly realistic, did feel “balanced”—the baddies (aka “the Beast Things”) were capable of holding their own, using tricks and strategy to thwart the good guys.  1950s sci-fi can sometimes feel out-of-date.  I’m happy to say that wasn’t the case here.

 

    8 Stars.  Daybreak 2250 AD was a re-read for me, although it’s been about 60 years since I first read it.  It was one of two books that had a major impact on my literary preferences as a kid, the other being Evan Hunter’s Danger: Dinosaurs!  The latter sits on my Kindle, waiting to be read again.  I hope it delights me the second time around as much as Daybreak 2250 AD did.

Key Out Of Time - Andre Norton

    1963; 178 pages.  New Author? : No.  Genre : 50’s Sci Fi.  Book #4 of the Time Traders  series.  Overall Rating : 7½*/10.

    Hawaika – according to a cosmic tape, it should be a lush, tropical, thriving planet.  Instead, the Time Traders found it almost entirely ocean-covered, with only a few spits of lifeless land jutting above the sea.  What happened?

    Fortunately, the Time Traders have a device they call a peep-probe, which can see how a selected place looked like in the past.  And 10,000 years ago Hawaika looked like what was seen on the tape.  A mere 500 years later, the planet was barren.  Could Hawaika’s fate be changed if the time travelers hop back to before “the big event”?  More importantly, should they interfere with history?   

What’s To Like...
    This is classic Science Fiction.  The target audience is teenage boys, who were only ones reading it in the early 60’s.  So Key Out Of Time has no cussing, no sex, and above all, no romance.  There is some killing and bloodshed, but the gore is kept to a minimum.

     The storyline is vintage Andre (Alice) Norton.  She loved to use time-travel themes, which is how I got hooked on her books as a boy.  But there are some remarkably forward-looking themes here too.  For instance, one of the protagonists is a girl, another is a croipple, and two others are dolphins.  Norton makes it a point to show they all are just as important on the mission as the white males.  Indeed, our main hero, Ross, sometimes feels like the backward one.

    Norton also takes a couple subtle pokes at the “Better dead than Red” mindset of the 1960’s.  Heady stuff for something published at the height of the Cold War.

    The story moves at a crisp pace.  We don’t really move around a lot in the alien world (that’s also vintage Norton), but she does throw a bunch of fascinating people, animals, gadgets, and magic at us to keep us entertained.  And Norton postulates the Prime Directive here, years before Star Trek employed it.  Maybe this is where Gene Roddenberry got the idea for it.

Kewlest New Word...
    Immure (verb)  : To enclose or confine someone against their will.

Excerpts...
    “Suppose” – Ross rolled over on his stomach, pillowed his head on his arms – “we could uncover some of that knowledge –“
    The twitch was back at Ashe’s lips. “That’s the risk we have to run now.”
    “Risk?”
    “Would you give a child one of those hand weapons we found in the derelict?”
    “Naturally not!” Ross snapped and then saw the point.  “You mean – we aren’t to be trusted?”
    The answer was plain to read in Ashe’s expression.  (loc. 139 )

    Rule One: Conserve native life to the fullest extent.  Humanoid form may not be the only evidence of intelligence.
    There were the dolphins to prove that point right on Terra.  But did Rule One mean that you had to let a monster nibble at you because it might just be a high type of alien intelligence?  Let Karara spout Rule One while backed into a crevice under water with that horn stabbing at her mid-section!  (loc. 270)

Kindle Details...
    Key Out Of Time is a free download at Amazon, as are the first three books in this series.  The copyrights on a bunch of Andre Norton’s early works have expired, meaning anyone can publish them.  A lot of these are also available as free downloads.  You can tell them quickly at Amazon; none of them have a “real” book cover.  I’m guessing the artwork is still copyrighted.

“Ross, where are we?”  “Better say – when are we?” he replied.”  (loc. 529)
    FWIW, the fundamental question – what happened to civilization on Hawaika – is never answered.  Maybe that’s dealt with in the three sequels to KooT, but they were written 30 years afterward.  Maybe we’re supposed to ponder whether the Time Traders’ visit to Hawaika changed its history.  It’s hard to say.

    Science Fiction has come a long way since its Golden Age of the 1950’s/60’s.  Storylines are more complex, the books and series are longer, alien planets are much more detailed, and the physics of galactic travel is now an art in itself.  Sci Fi is no longer just for adolescent boys.

    Still, I enjoy reading classic Sci Fi on occasion, and Andre Norton is often what I reach for first.  7½ Stars.

A Wrinkle In Time - Madeleine L'Engle

    1962; 203 pages.  New Author? : Yes.  Laurels : Newbery Medal (1963); Sequoyah Book Award (1965); Lewis Carroll Shelf Award (1964); #23 on the ALA’s “Most Frequently Challenged Books” for 1990-1999 .  Genre : Science Fiction; YA.  Overall Rating : 8*/10.

    It’s been a year since Meg Murry’s father disappeared.  Supposedly, he was on a secret government project, but people are whispering it was for another woman.  Now Meg struggles in school, worries that she’s ugly, and gets in trouble defending her precocious-but-weird little brother, Charles Wallace.  Her mother carries on with her scientific work, but Meg’s beginning to wonder if she’ll ever see Father again.

    Ah, but things are about to change.  Calvin O’Keefe doesn’t think she’s ugly, and he’s on the high school football team.  A strange lady – Mrs. Whatsit – has moved into the nearby haunted house, and Charles Wallace says she’s a great friend.  And one night, when  Calvin, Charles, and Meg find themselves drawn to the haunted house, they are both surprised and excited when Mrs. Whatsit announces that they will all be going out to rescue Mr. Murry.  Immediately.

What’s To Like...
    A Wrinkle In Time is a YA novel – bordering on Juvenile – yet introduces Quantum Physics concepts to the reader.  It features a high school girl as its protagonist, which was almost unheard of for sci-fi in those days.  It promotes science in general, and chemistry in particular : in order to stop the UE from hypnotizing her, Meg recites the Periodic Table.  How kewl is that?!

    There’s no sex or cussing, and only a hint of puppy-dog romance developing.  The fate of the world hangs in the balance, yet no one gets killed.  Madeleine L’Engle takes you – and the kids – to several fascinating worlds with equally fascinating creatures.

    There is a happy ending, but there’s also a strong message delivered about the danger of conformity.  The pacing is crisp (a must for a YA book), there are riddles to solve, and some thought-provoking scenes, such as when Meg tries to explain “seeing” to sentient creatures that have no eyes.  Last but not least, there is both time-hopping and dimension-hopping.

Kewlest New Word...
    Swivet (n.) : A panic or extreme discomposure.  Well, tesseract is probably the kewlest new word, but it’s a made-up one, at least in the sense that it’s used here.

Excerpts...
    When they got back to the house Mrs. Murry was still in the lab.  She was watching a pale blue fluid move slowly through a tube from a beaker to a retort.  Over a Bunsen burner bubbled a big, earthenware dish of stew.  “Don’t tell Sandy and Dennys I’m cooking out here,” she said.  “they’re always suspicious that a few chemicals may get in with the meat, but I had an experiment I wanted to stay with.”   (pg. 36 )

    “What do you want?” she asked.  “It isn’t paper time yet; we’ve had milk time; we’ve had this month’s Puller Prush Person; and I’ve given my Decency Donations regularly.  All my papers are in order.”
    “I think your little boy dropped his ball,” Charles Wallace said, holding it out.
    The woman pushed the ball away.  “Oh, no!  The children in our section never drop balls!  We haven’t had an Aberration for three years.”  (pg. 101)

“There is such a thing as a tesseract.”  (pg. 20)
        I decided to read A Wrinkle In Time because I was curious how a multiple-award-winning YA book could also end up high on the Banned Books list.  ANAICT, it stems from one short passage where the kids are naming the “great fighters against the darkness” in history, and Jesus is listed as just one of a number of enlightened people who did that (pg. 85).  Heavens to Betsy.

    There are some witches who turn out to not be witches, and a crystal ball that is more like a remote camera than a fortune-telling device.  Compared to Harry Potter, this is very tame stuff.  And good luck on getting HP banned.

    Adults may find the storyline to be too simplistic, particularly the “method” used to overcome the darkness.  But we are not the target audience.  When you keep that in mind, AWIT is a light, delightful read, and a book that really isn’t just another cookie-cutter 1960’s sci-fi story.

    8 Stars.  Highly recommended as a book for kids, but sufficiently entertaining for adults as well.  Add another star if you happen to be YA and are interested in science.

The Defiant Agents - Andre Norton

1962; 222 pages.  Book #3 of the Time Traders series.  New Author? : No.  Genre : 50's Science Fiction.  Overall Rating : 7½*/10.

    There is something important - something powerful - on the distant planet Topaz, the records of the ancient star-travelers say so.  We need to find it and take possesion of it fast, before the Russians do.  But conditions on Topaz are harsh and geeky scientists and technicians have poor survival skills.  So let's Apachify them before shipping them out.

    Alas, the Russkies got there first, and their crew has been Mongolized.  Spirit of Cochise, meet Spirit of Genghis Khan!

What's To Like...
    The "Apachifying" process is a unique twist, which Andre Norton calls "the Redax".  Basically, it's the imprinting of 1800's Apache knowledge and instincts into  modern-day brains.  You end up a little bit schizophrenic, but you can live off the land and are one heckuva fighter.  Two coyotes are also given the Redax treatment, making them beastmaster kewl.

    It seems Norton did a lot of research in prepping for this book - the Apache gods, phrases, and culture are convincing.  There's space-travel instead of time-travel,  and we get lots of action, an alien planet to explore, some nasty otherworldly fauna, and a good ending.  The characters aren't deep (this is 50's Sci-Fi, after all), but the two opposing sides are complex, with neither one being all-good or all-bad.

Kewlest New Word...
    Kumiss : a drink common among the Mongols, made from fermented mare's milk.

Excerpts...
    (T)he male coyote went into action.  Days ago he had managed to work loose the lower end of the mesh which fronted his cage, but his mind had told him that a sortie inside the ship was valueless.  The odd rapport he'd had with the human brains, unknown to them, had operated to keep him to the old role of cunning deception, which in the past had saved countless of his species from sudden and violent death.  Now with teeth and paws he went diligently to work, urged on by the whines of his mate, that tantalizing smell of an outside world tickling their nostrils - a wild world, lacking the taint of man-places.  (loc. 249)

    They thrust her out into the circle of waiting men and she planted her feet firmly apart, glaring at them all indiscriminately until she sighted Travis.  Then her anger became hotter and more deadly.
    "Pig!  Rooter in the dirt!  Diseased camel -" she shouted at him in English and then reverted to her own tongue, her voice riding up and down the scale.  Her hands were tied behind her back, but there were no bonds on her tongue.
    "This is one who can speak thunders, and shoot lightnings from her mouth," Buck commented in Apache.  "Put her well away from the wood, lest she set it aflame."  (loc. 1934)

Kindle Details...
    You can pay anything from $0.00 to $3.99 for the Kindle version of The Defiant Agents.  Needless to say, I opted for the freebie.  It looks like a number of Andre Norton books are now public domain, although only a few have been Kindle-ized so far.

Was the enemy always on the other side of the world?  Or could he wear the same uniform, even share the same goals?  (loc. 102)
    The Defiant Agents was published in 1962, which is important for two reasons.  First, it means the target audience was young, teen-age boys.  As such, there's no sex, no cussing, a straighforward plotline, and only a hint of romance.  Second, this was at the height of the Cold War.  Russia was The Enemy, and prudent people built fall-out shelters in their backyards.

    Given that mind-set, Andre Norton sneaks some powerful-yet-subtle messages into her story.  First, we may be the good guys, but we're not much different from the bad guys.  Second, our leaders can fool us, just like the Russian leaders fool their people.  Third, you really can't trust anybody with the possession of WMD's.

    7½ Stars.  Because it will entertain young minds while also giving them lots to think about.

First Cycle - H. Beam Piper and Michael Kurland

1982 (and 1964); 201 pages.  Genre : 50's Science Fiction.  New Author : Yes, and No.  Overall Rating : 7*/10.

    Hetaira and Thalassa are twin planets in a foreign - yet strangely familiar - solar system.  First Cycle is their history, from Day 1 (literally) until the present.  And the present is just a cosmic eyeblink since they discovered sentient life on each other.

What's To Like...
    Hetaira and Thalassa may be twins, but they're not identical twins.  One of them (Thalassa) got the lion's share of the available water when they formed, and this influenced both planets' evolutionary patterns.

    There are other differences as well.  One uses gods and magic to guide them; the other relies on reasoning.  One has a centralized government; the other is just a bunch of decentralized clans.  And the beings on one have five fingers (just like us); while the natives on the other planet have six (a kewl extra opposable thumb).

    What is impressive is the even treatment of these differences.  As communication between the races improves, mutual incomprehension increases.  In the end, their actions - whether imparted by deities or derived from logic - are remarkably similar.

    Despite being only 200 pages long, this is an epic tale.  We start with the planets' formation, and their long paths of evolution are recounted.  Interesting, but it comes at a cost of a slow start and most characters appearing only briefly before blinking out.

Kewlest New Word...
    There were none that floated my boat.

Excerpts...
    They had no gods, and the very concept of a supreme being was incomprehensible to them.  They asked questions, and they accepted nothing on faith.  They asked:  What is it?  What holds it up?  How far away is it?  What is it really like?  They of Hetaira had escaped the two blind alleys of religion and magic; they had already learned that things of nature had natural causes, and that if one were smart enough to ask the proper questions, nature would not withhold its secrets.  (pg. 29)

    "But their attitude, and their behavior; I don't know how long I can stand it.  They have no sense of shame or morality.  They degrade women by letting them do men's work."
    "They do seem to have complete equality of the sexes," Skrov-Rogov said.
    "Disgusting!" the priest said."And have you seen how they behave toward each other?  Running around naked; both sexes bathing together.  And they certainly like to bathe - they're the cleanest beasts I ever saw."  (pg. 170)

"They riot for bread - and they begin by destroying the bakeries!"  (pg. 111)
    There are joint authors.  First Cycle was published in 1982.  H. Beam Piper is listed as the author, but he died in 1964.  Michael Kurland "expanded and editied" it from an outline found in Piper's papers after the latter's death.  It is a nice balance between Science and Fiction.  It is also very ambitious and complex, so if you view it as 50's Sci-Fi, it is decades ahead of its time.

    First Cycle has a more serious than Piper's "Little Fuzzy" series.  It has a lot to say about religion, government, science, philosophy, etc.  It even takes a prehumous (as opposed to "posthumous") poke at the efforts of the SETI folks.

    Life evolves, and so does Literature.  There are science fiction books today that are more "epic" than this, but none do it in only 200 pages.  First Cycle is one of the few books that can be called a "Short-Winded Saga".  7 Stars.

Earthman's Burden - Poul Anderson and Gordon R. Dickson

1957; 189 pages.  Genre : 50's Science Fiction; Humor.  New Author(s)? : No.  Overall Rating : 5*/10.

    Earthman's Burden consists of six short stories (each about 30 pages long) about the Hokas, a race of Teddy Bear-like creatures on an alien planet.  You also meet their human plenipotentiary, Alexander Jones, and his wife, Tanni.  All but one of the stories originally appeared in various Sci-Fi magazines in between 1951 and 1955.  A couple "interplanetary memos" were later inserted to try to give some cohesion to the tales, but frankly, it wasn't necessary.

What's To Like...
      Hokas love everything about earth - our movies, our books, our history, our radio transmissions.  They take everything as absolute truth, so if they see a movie, say, about ancient Rome, they immediately try to build a settlement on their planet Toka to mimic it.

   Each of the stories in Earthman's Burden is set in one of these mimicries.  Specifically, the settings are (in order) : (1) the Wild West; (2) Don Juan; (3) Space Travel; (4) Sherlock Holmes; (5) Pirates; and (6) the French Foreign Legion.

    The stories all have a similar template.  Alex awakes to find the Hokas embracing a new bit of terra-culture; he gets embroiled in their antics; some sort of crisis arises; mayhem ensues, Alex devises an ingenious solution by going "in character", and all turns out well because of (or in spite of) the best-laid plans of the Hokas/Alex.

Kewlest New Word...
Tussock : an area of raised solid ground in a marsh or bog that is bound together by roots of low vegetation.

Excerpts...
    "Great jumping rockets!" exclaimed the other Hoka.  "Don't tell me the Coordinator didn't recognize you?"
    "It's the moonlight, probably," said the first Hoka.  "All clear and on green now, Coordinator?"
    "I- I-," stammered Alex.
    "Aye, aye!" repeated Jax Bennison crisply.  (pg. 68)

    Alex discovered the consensus among them was that the captain was becoming too obsessed with his navigation to pay proper attention to the running of the ship.  No one had been hanged for several weeks, and there hadn't been a keelhauling for over a month.  Many a Hoka standing on the sun-blistered deck cast longing glances at the cool water overside and wished he would be keelhauled (which was merely fun on a planet without barnacles).  There was much fo'c'sle talk about what act could be committed dastardly enough to rate the punishment.  (pg. 135)

"Damn the tiddlywinks!  Full speed ahead!"  (pg. 186)
    The stories are cute but formulaic and shallow.  This was my second Hoka book, and chronologically precedes the other one, which is reviewed here.  Frankly, I didn't find Earthman's Burden as entertaining as Hoka!.

    Maybe it was because Poul Anderson and Gordon R. Dickson were still feeling their way around in the series.  Maybe it was because the attempt to string these six stories into a coherent overall novel was ill-advised.  Maybe it was because of the horrid printing job - each page was set on about a 10-degree angle.

    In any event, all six tales are still amusing to read, and a pleasant break if you're plodding through a 1200-page Space Opera like I am.  It's uninspiring fluff, but that's okay at times.  Anderson and Dickson would subsequently  tweak and refine their style, and their efforts would pay off when Hoka! came out.  And I do appreciate it when authors evolve and improve with each work they put out.  5 Stars (out of 10).

Fuzzy Sapiens - H. Beam Piper

1964; 235 pages.  Genre : Classic Science Fiction.  New Author? : No.  Overall Rating : 7*/10.
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Fuzzy Sapiens is the sequel to Little Fuzzy (which is reviewed here).  The Fuzzies have been declared sentient, which means you can't kill them, skin them, and/or eat them.  They now have certain rights to their planet, even if all they want to do is snuggle up to the humans and eat their Extee-3 rations.
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But a planetary governemnt has to be established, the Fuzzies need to be protected, and a stable economic system needs to be implemented.  Who knew that these mundane issues would turn out to be so complex?
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What's To Like...
This is "hard" science fiction (meaning 'realistic') from before there was such a sub-genre.  What little thrills-&-spills action there is comes late in the book, and half of it is off-stage.
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Instead you get to help solve a number of real-world issues.  The Fuzzies' Infant Mortality Rate is excessive to where they will be extinxt in a couple generations.  They only eat land prawns and Extee-3 and the planetary supplies of those is such that they'll starve to death before they become extinct.
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The Fuzzies are amenable to be "adopted" by humans, but the demand outstrips the supply.  Will a black market spring up?  Their homeland is ripe for mineral exploitation, and sentient or not, humans are coming by the thousands to colonize the planet.
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For a change, chemists - and even large corporations - are given a fair shake.  Some of the Bad Guys from Little Fuzzy become Good Guys,  and some of the Good Guys from Little Fuzzy develop character faults.
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Kewlest New Word(s)...
I'm tempted to go with Nifflheim, which Piper uses as a euphemism for 'Hell', except that towards the end he just up and uses the h-word anyway.  So instead, we'll go with : Mumchance (adj.) : mute, not speaking.
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Excerpts...
And this red upholstered swivel chair; he hated that worst of all.  Forty years ago, he'd left Terra to get the seat of his pants off the seat of a chair like that, and here he was in the evening of life - well, late afternoon, call it around second cocktail time - trapped in one.  (pg. 8)
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Titanium, he thought disgustedly.  It would be something like that.  What is it they called the stuff?  Oh, yes; the nymphomaniac metal; when it gets hot it combines with anything.  (pg. 153)
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    "Miss Tresca, can't you keep your bench in better order than this?" he scolded.  "Keep things in their places.  What are you working on?"
    "Oh, a hunch I had about this hokfusine."
    Hunch!  That was the trouble, all through Science Center; too many hunches and not enough sound theory.  (pg. 158)
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"Last war's enemies; next war's allies."  (pg. 127)
To a certain degree, H. Beam Piper ignores the greater issues of humans colonizing an already-inhabited planet.  The Fuzzies are migrating, and in droves, but nobody bothers to ask why.  The full impact of overwhelming hordes of humans descending on the Fuzzies habitat is not assessed.  Nobody asks what the Fuzzies ate before they got hooked on Terran Extee-3.
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But I think this misses the point of Fuzzy Sapiens.  There may be some significant issues to be faced, but the target audience is still Young Readers.  To fully address "the big picture" would mean perhaps a 1000-page opus.  Instead, Piper presents only a slice of it, and takes less than 250 pages to do so.  He thereby subtly entices Young Readers to consider becoming chemists, and to explore what we call the Scientific Method.  I think that's kinda kewl.  7 Stars.

Little Fuzzy - H. Beam Piper

1962; 174 pages. Genre : 50's Sci-Fi. Laurels : nominated for the Hugo Award in 1963. New Author? : Yes. Overall Rating : 7½*/10.

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Q. : If you landed on another planet, and encountered something that, say, looked like a Wookie or an Ewok, how would you know whether to make friends with it or shoot it for its meat and fur? A. : By determining whether it's a sapient being.

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Fair enough. But how would you define "sapient"? Well, the Zarathustra Company uses the guideline of whether it can talk and build a fire. And they have a charter to develop and exploit the natural resources on one particular planet, provided it has no sapient beings. That's an important clause, because if sentient creatures are found, they are the rightful owners of the planet, and Zarathustra Company's charter instantly becomes null and void. And wouldn't you know it, Jack Holloway has just crossed paths with a family of Hoka-looking "Fuzzies".

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What's To Like...

Little Fuzzy is a short, cute, easy-to-read, Sci-Fi story from the early 60's. Its target audience is young boys, yet it addresses some serious issues. Is it okay to do environmental damage to an ecosystem, as long as the creatures in it are non-sapient? How is sapience determined, and who makes that decision? What if a species is "almost" sapient? Are there any consequences if you kill a native creature prior to its sapience being determined? If something is good for the company that employs you, but unethical, can you still do it?

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For adults, the storyline might be a bit unbelievable and simplistic. Faced with a suit-&-countersuit, a judge decides to simply hold both trials simultaneously. And there's no need to determine whether a witness is telling the truth, we have a handy-dandy, infallible, lie-detector-type thingy called a Veridicator. How convenient.

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All characters are either black or white, and the story shows its age by the fact that drinking and smoking cigarettes are portrayed as normal daily activities for all adults, good or bad. Not the sort of thing you want influencing a kid reading this.

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Kewlest Word...

Colloquy : a formal conversation or conference.

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Excerpts...

"They don't talk, and they don't build fires," Ahmed Khadra said, as though that settled it.

"Ahmed, you knw better than that. That talk-and-build-a-fire rule isn't any scientific test at all."

"It's a legal test," Lunt supported his subordinate.

"It's a rule-of-thumb that was set up so that settlers on new planets couldn't get away with murdering and enslaving the natives by claiming they thought they were only hunting and domesticating wild animals," he said. "Anything that talks and builds a fire is a sapient being, yes. That's the law. But that doesn't mean that anything that doesn't isn't." (pg. 36)

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"They will have a nice, neat, pedantic definition of sapience, tailored especially to exclude the Fuzzies, and they will present it in court and try to get it accepted, and it's up to us to guess in advance what that will be, and have a refutation of it ready, and also a definition of our own."

"Their definition will have to include Khooghras. Gerd, do the Khooghras bury their dead?"

"Hell, no; they eat them. But you have to give them this, they cook them first." (pgs. 97-98)

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If you don't like the facts, you ignore them, and if you need facts, dream up some you do like. (pg. 15)

Little Fuzzy's straightforward plotline won't challenge an adult reader, but that wasn't the target audience. OTOH, at the end of the book, H. Beam Piper launches into a 5-page diatribe giving his own definition of sapience (it was a subject near and dear to his heart), which will probably be over the heads of young readers.

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So what? This was a delightful, light story that will nevertheless leave readers of all ages pondering issues such as corporate greed, destructive environmental practices (even when they're NIMBY), animal rights (sapient and otherwise), gun rights, and capital punishment.

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Little Fuzzy is one of those rare books that I thought should have been twice as long as it is. 7½ Stars.

Time Traders - Andre Norton

2000 (this "Omnibus" edition); 438 pages. Genre : 50's Sci Fi. New Author? : No. See here. Overall Rating : 6*/10.

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This is a bundling of two Andre Norton books - Time Traders (1958) and its sequel Galactic Derelict (1959). Both books are set in the near future, when both Russia and the USA have discovered time-travel. But Russia has several additional technological wonders, and it is theorized that someone or something in the past is giving them those marvels. So newbies Ross Murdock (TT) and Travis Fox (GD) sign on with a spec ops team to journey back into the past to find this ancient source of secrets and "take it down".

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What's To Like...

Norton sets you down in some cool historical places, such as Bronze Age northern Europe and Ice Age southwestern USA. There are cool people, such as Beaker Traders, Ax people, Folsom hunters, and long-gone animals such as mammoths and saber-toothed tigers. And there are some not-so-friendly aliens that take exception to us savages making off with their property.

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The action starts off fast, and all chapters end with a "hook" to keep you turning the pages. There's not a lot of depth of character. Instead, Norton focuses on making the settings come alive. That's true even of the futuristic places, and she heightens the realism by inventing some neat things like "healing jelly" and a "home photo" gizmo which reads the viewer's mind an shows whatever individual images he has of home.

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There is no sex, booze, or drugs in these stories, so they're safe for the kiddies. There is some killing, but without the gore. The background setting - the cold war between Russia and the USA - is somewhat dated, and it appears that a couple sections of the book were given "updates" in 2000, such as the inclusion of a computer-generated role-playing game.

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Kewl New Words...

Welter : a confused mass; a jumble. Fetor : an offensive odor. Brindled : brown or grayish in color, with darker streaks or spots. Inimical : unfriendly. Snaffled : seized quickly and easily.

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Excerpts...

"The Greeks built in stone, wrote their books, kept their history to bequeath it to their successors, and so did the Romans. And on this side of the ocean the Incas, the Mayas, the unknown races before them, and the Aztecs of Mexico all built in stone and worked in metal. And stone and metal survive. But what if there had been an early people who used plastics and brittle alloys, who had no desire to build permanent buildings, whose tools and artifacts were meant to wear out quickly, perhaps for economic reasons? What would they leave us - considering, perhaps, that an ice age had intervened between their time and ours, with glaciers to grind into dust what little they did possess?" (pg. 45)

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They had not even scratched the surface of was to be found in this ancient port. Had the jungle-cloaked city been the capital of some galaxy-wide empire, as Ashe suspected? They had no time to explore very far. Yes, there would be a return - sometime. And men from his world would search and speculate, and learn, and guess - perhaps wrongly. Then, after a while there again would be a new city rising somewhere - maybe on his own world - which would serve as a storehouse of knowledge gained from star to star. Time would pass, and that city, too, would die. Until some representative of a race yet unborn would come to search and speculate - and guess. (pg. 413)

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When you give up a belief in luck, you're licked! (pg. 402)

There is nothing epic about Andre Norton stories, but they do keep the action going on a local level, and capture bygone and alien eras quite nicely. The fate of empires might not hang in the balance, but what does transpire seems close to what would really happen the first time we step into the past or onto an alien world light years away from here.

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Norton's stories show their age, yet in some ways she was quite ahead of her time. The Apache Indians are presented in a favorable light, which is rare. We Americans may be better than them dirty Russkies, but the human race as a whole is cosmologically unimpressive. Her heroes tend to be loners, not squeaky-clean boy scouts.

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I loved Andre Norton's stories as kid; and still find them fun to read on an occasional basis. But Science Fiction has evolved significantly since its heyday in the 50's. Without that nostalgic tie-in, readers may find her books a bit "meh". 6 Stars.

Hoka - Poul Anderson and Gordon Dickson

1984 (but three of the stories are actually from 1955-57); 253 pages. Genre : 50's Sci-Fi. Overall Rating : C+.

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What if the initial humanoid contact for those cute furry Ewoks in the Star Wars series, instead of being Darth and Luke and Death Stars; had been terran Movies, Books, TV, and History? This book explores that, save that the living, breathing teddy bears here are called Hokas. The book is a compilation of four stand-alone stories (There's a fifth one, but it's a 10-page exercise in self-promotion and is eminently skippable) starring these ursine creatures, who love everything about our culture, and who completely immerse themselves in role-playing, including uniforms, earthly accents, and literary/cinematic dialogue.

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What's To Like...

Three of the stories are take-offs of (literary) Casey At The Bat, Sherlock Holmesian mysteries, and Kipling's The Jungle Book. The fourth one draws upon (historical) Napoleonic Europe, as seen in the cover art. The compilation is a fun read, and a quick one. The stories have neat drawings in them done by one Phil Foglio. The Hokas can drink all other creatures in the universe under the table, and in one story (written in the 1950's) a curiously stimulating herb of some sort is smoked.

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There's not much depth here, but that's typical for the genre. There are two instances of cussing, albeit mild ("H*ll and d*mnation" and "a h*ll of a request"). Which seemed needless to me, since the salty-mouthed alien spouting these phrases had just engaged in about 10 pages of ersatz swearing. For example, "Go sputz yourself" and "Sput Meowr. Meourl spss rowul rhnrrr!"

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Cool/New Words...

Encardined : reddened. Ineluctable : unavoidable. Aquiline : with the characteristic of an eagle or the beak of one. Sui Generis : in a class of its own. Mangel Wurzel : a large beet used for cattle feed (although here it was a term of endearment). Brobdingnag : a land where everything is huge (taken from Gulliver's Travels, and definitely one bodacious word). Autochthones : indigenous people.

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Excerpts...

"It may be sheer accident," Brob suggested. "Mortal fallibility. There is a great deal of wisdom in the universe; unfortunately, it is divided up among individuals." (pg. 178)

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The Hoka France had never had a revolution, merely an annual Bastille Day fête. At the most recent of these, Napoleon had taken advantage of the chaos to depose the king, who cooperated because it would be more fun being a field marshal. The excitement delighted the whole nation and charged it with enthusiasm. Only in Africa was this ignored, the Foreign Legion preferring to stay in its romantic, if desolate, outposts. (pg. 201)

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"I was born with a dull, sickening thud..." (Hoka-penned literature)

Hoka was a nostalgic visit to the sort of book I used to read in my early teens. A lot of Poul Anderson's books reportedly deal with time- and dimension-travel; similar to my favorite writer from those years - Andre Norton. The Hoka series seems to be a comedic side-project by Anderson and Dickson.

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I liked the clever and subtle introducing of higher lit to young readers. Unfortunately, science fiction has come a long way in the past half-century, so this book came off a bit dated. It was a pleasurable read, but there wasn't much substance to it. We'll give it a "C+" and resolve to read at least one of Anderson's mainstream sci-fi books, to see how it compares to Norton.