The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 29 September 2011
by Rena Vale
Dorian Frank XIV finds himself stranded on a presumably deserted planet somewhere out in the midst of the Pleiades star cluster. It is a routine mission, but his one-man ship is damaged and the mother ship has to return to Earth to get the needed spare parts, a two-month journey. So, Dorian has to make do on this planet, which turns out to be pretty hospitable, right down to the naked English-speaking humans he finds dwelling in a forest of walking trees. They are led by Pete, a bloodthirsty dictator of his community in the woods. The people are unclothed (a convenient fantasy), unschooled and uninhibited. They follow Pete and he claims to protect them from the evil daels and daelsnarks, man-eating monsters of the hills and the sea. Dorian discovers that the humans are the degenerated decendents of a group of hippies from the 1960s, kidnapped three centuries before by an alien race at the start of an interplanetary war. It isn't really clear what point the author is trying to make about the back-to-the-land hippies of her era. She depicts their history of entitlement and drug-addled credulity as the reason they make up most of the humans who were kidnapped. These descendents of the flower-children are portrayed as now savage, ignorant and superstitious. The daels are even worse, another degenerate species of meat-eaters. Neither of them is deemed worthy of keeping the planet Taurus Four all to themselves, and Dorian is determined that the men and women of modern Earth will dominate and civilize this "paradise".
The book was first published in 1970, when the hippies were insurgent, and the memories of Charles Manson were very fresh. One supposes the author can be forgiven for turning a jaundiced eye upon the future of the movement. While her description of the modern "civilized" Earth of 2270 isn't particularly appealing either, it is clear which world she considers superior. Often in such books, there is a wistful longing toward the simpler people of nature, but Dorian has none of that. He has seen the excesses of Pete the dictator, supposedly drug-crazed by chewing on stalks of hemp, and plots to save an appropriately submissive beautiful young virgin from her degenerate culture. Still, this is a swift and taut sci-fi novel. Unlike many (mostly male) sci-fi authors, Vale's descriptions of frequent fighting between men are mercifully brief and free of bloody detail. In the end the reader may be surprised who, or what, represents the most sympathetic character.
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