Warning: Spoilers! Spoilers!
Just finished reading Planet of the Damned, by legendary SF writer Harry Harrison. I think it’s the first novel I read by the man (who’s 80-something – does he still write, I wonder?). I may have read some of his stuff as a kid, though. Deathworld sounds familiar, but I might be confusing it with Planet of Death. So much pain and suffering in the world of SF, no?
It was a quick read. So quick, in fact, that I needed to read it with a fire extinguisher handy (that’s really, really poor book reviewer humor). Three days, but three hours of actual reading time. If you saw the stacks of books I have on deck, you’d see how read speed really appeals to me. While I don’t hold that against a book, there was something that didn’t feel right about this. I wasn’t looking for Tolstoy, obviously, but early on I realized this felt like an extended episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation: Picard and Riker try to avert an interplanetary war.
Planet of the Damned is the story of two neighbor planets, Dis and Nyjord, about as antithetical as any pair freshly sprung from the mind of an SF grandmaster. Dis is dry, hot, and thoroughly inhospitable. Water’s rare and the plant life’ll kill you. Mankind has adopted to this world, but it hasn’t been pretty. Loose confederations of barbaric natives are lorded over by an even more vicious class of warriors – the magter. Props for the very Germanic, very guttural, and very menacing name for the bad guys, Mr. Harrison. These emotionless killers wind up playing a very important role in the story.
Unfortunately, it’s kind of downhill in the journey from concept to specifics. Specifically, the hero, the lad we’re supposed to be cheering on. I tend to dislike characters whose names are cluttered with colorless consonance. In this case, Brion Brandd. And that second “d” at the end? It just gives an inappropriate air of cutesiness and sounds very unrealistic.
Anyhow, Brion Brandd turns out to be not too likeable – not unlikeable, but not likeable, either. Kind of a big dumb slab of meat, a Schwarzeneggar without the personality. He won a planetwide Olympiad of twenty competitions, including not only fencing and martial arts but chess and poetry (which in itself is a good idea) – yet all he does is slug it out and shoot it out with baddies. Why not use brains and creativity, in addition to brawn? Why tell us he’s this awesome strategic thinker and Byronesque master of the rhyme and metaphor, and only have him do a Hulk smash on everything?
I was also surprised at a lack of imagination for various items that cross our paths in this distant future tale: “sand cars”? “radios”? “blow guns”? “cobalt bombs”? Okay, cobalt bombs are better than hydrogen bombs (which they were called in the beginning chapters). But couldn’t he think up slightly more futuristic-sounding modes of transportation and communication? The Disan natives have this symbiotic relationship with a vine they carry that trades water with them while drawing blood from little fangs inserted in the native’s mouth. All right, that cancels out the blow guns. Still, though …
Brandd must discover the five w’s – who, what, where, why, and how – concerning the threat of cobalt annihilation of Nyjord by unfriendlies on Dis, before Nyjord defensively bombs Dis to disintegration. Nyjord is as loving and peaceful as Dis is dirty and nasty. Truthfully, the Nyorders interested me more than the Disans. They are these nonviolent cultural specialists in the philosophy of interrelationships. Kind of like anti-Disans, but much more appealing as I’d like to know a bit more of this philosophy that’s somehow valued above all others in this Harrisonian universe. Anyway, for them to preemptively strike Dis would destroy them as a society, so there’s this no-win situation that our big dumb slab of meat has to solve. Does turn out it’s the bad guys, the magter, which we all knew from early on, but their “secret” – mind-controlling brain parasites – is sufficiently icky and explanatory to seal the deal and end the crisis and the book.
This review sounds harsher than intended; the book was enjoyable to read. I also know Harrison has a tendency to be very tongue-in-cheek, so maybe I misread a lot of the book. If so, I apologize. I would like to read more of his work, especially as he became quite the satirist – often parodying the swashbuckling ultra-conservatism of Robert Heinlein. I give the book a C+, but with the coda that I will gladly give another Harry Harrison novel my time and attention.
It was a quick read. So quick, in fact, that I needed to read it with a fire extinguisher handy (that’s really, really poor book reviewer humor). Three days, but three hours of actual reading time. If you saw the stacks of books I have on deck, you’d see how read speed really appeals to me. While I don’t hold that against a book, there was something that didn’t feel right about this. I wasn’t looking for Tolstoy, obviously, but early on I realized this felt like an extended episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation: Picard and Riker try to avert an interplanetary war.
Planet of the Damned is the story of two neighbor planets, Dis and Nyjord, about as antithetical as any pair freshly sprung from the mind of an SF grandmaster. Dis is dry, hot, and thoroughly inhospitable. Water’s rare and the plant life’ll kill you. Mankind has adopted to this world, but it hasn’t been pretty. Loose confederations of barbaric natives are lorded over by an even more vicious class of warriors – the magter. Props for the very Germanic, very guttural, and very menacing name for the bad guys, Mr. Harrison. These emotionless killers wind up playing a very important role in the story.
Unfortunately, it’s kind of downhill in the journey from concept to specifics. Specifically, the hero, the lad we’re supposed to be cheering on. I tend to dislike characters whose names are cluttered with colorless consonance. In this case, Brion Brandd. And that second “d” at the end? It just gives an inappropriate air of cutesiness and sounds very unrealistic.
Anyhow, Brion Brandd turns out to be not too likeable – not unlikeable, but not likeable, either. Kind of a big dumb slab of meat, a Schwarzeneggar without the personality. He won a planetwide Olympiad of twenty competitions, including not only fencing and martial arts but chess and poetry (which in itself is a good idea) – yet all he does is slug it out and shoot it out with baddies. Why not use brains and creativity, in addition to brawn? Why tell us he’s this awesome strategic thinker and Byronesque master of the rhyme and metaphor, and only have him do a Hulk smash on everything?
I was also surprised at a lack of imagination for various items that cross our paths in this distant future tale: “sand cars”? “radios”? “blow guns”? “cobalt bombs”? Okay, cobalt bombs are better than hydrogen bombs (which they were called in the beginning chapters). But couldn’t he think up slightly more futuristic-sounding modes of transportation and communication? The Disan natives have this symbiotic relationship with a vine they carry that trades water with them while drawing blood from little fangs inserted in the native’s mouth. All right, that cancels out the blow guns. Still, though …
Brandd must discover the five w’s – who, what, where, why, and how – concerning the threat of cobalt annihilation of Nyjord by unfriendlies on Dis, before Nyjord defensively bombs Dis to disintegration. Nyjord is as loving and peaceful as Dis is dirty and nasty. Truthfully, the Nyorders interested me more than the Disans. They are these nonviolent cultural specialists in the philosophy of interrelationships. Kind of like anti-Disans, but much more appealing as I’d like to know a bit more of this philosophy that’s somehow valued above all others in this Harrisonian universe. Anyway, for them to preemptively strike Dis would destroy them as a society, so there’s this no-win situation that our big dumb slab of meat has to solve. Does turn out it’s the bad guys, the magter, which we all knew from early on, but their “secret” – mind-controlling brain parasites – is sufficiently icky and explanatory to seal the deal and end the crisis and the book.
This review sounds harsher than intended; the book was enjoyable to read. I also know Harrison has a tendency to be very tongue-in-cheek, so maybe I misread a lot of the book. If so, I apologize. I would like to read more of his work, especially as he became quite the satirist – often parodying the swashbuckling ultra-conservatism of Robert Heinlein. I give the book a C+, but with the coda that I will gladly give another Harry Harrison novel my time and attention.
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