By Brad Strickland
After spending a long space flight in suspended animation, colonist Tom Perion’s pod is ejected and he lands in the ocean. He is rescued by a ship with an all-female crew. He soon learns that women outnumber men on this planet 8 to 1. In a society that resembles pre-industrial Earth, women do all the work and have all the power, while men are treated like pets. From that alone, it sounds like the set-up for an erotic novel. Instead, this is a well-written sci-fi drama.
The book has a major revelation about twenty pages in. I won't spell it out here, but it's every bit as impactful as “the
Planet of the Apes is really Earth”. It feels like it's breaking a sci-fi rule to have this type of twist so early. I can’t help but wonder if
Strickland originally wanted that revelation to be closer to the end,
only to discover he had more story to tell after the reveal than before
it.
It’s a well-constructed world for a one-off
novel, and I wouldn’t mind using the setting for an RPG. The author
goes into great detail about the society, the animals, the plants, and
so on, but manages to spread it out so you aren’t presented with one
huge boring infodump. A lot of sci-fi authors try to make things alien
by just making them weird, but Strickland actually thinks the
ecology through, even putting thought into this planet’s evolutionary
ladder. A good rule of writing is to know way more about the setting
than you actually put in the story. In this case I yearn to know what
was left on the cutting room floor. I would love a complete sourcebook
about this planet.
This book was published in the 80s, but to me the
style feels more like the 60s/70s, when speculative fiction was
actually speculative. Don’t get me wrong, I love the cheesy 80s and
modern sci-fi. But let’s face it, the genre has lost its sense of
wonder, and is now just drama that happens to be set in the space.
Sometimes it’s fun to read a story that actually does its homework,
especially if it’s written as well as this one.
Excellent book, well worth the read.
Excellent book, well worth the read.
