1962 science fiction, re-read. Zarathustra was an uninhabited planet
when humanity arrived, so the Company owns it and everyone's happy.
Until Jack Holloway the old sunstone prospector comes along with some
crazy story about the animals he's found being intelligent natives…
As usual, it's the most up-to-date stuff that now feels most
dated, with data transfers on tape, movie film that needs to be
developed, and even occasional typewriters. Cocktail hour had really
only got started in the 1920s, but Piper clearly felt that it was here
to stay. (But for people who are easily terrified by adults drinking
and smoking in moderation, John Scalzi has rewritten this book into a
sanitised modern version.)
And yes, all right, there's only one significant female character, and
she's a psychologist; still, she does several things important to the
plot (by being a psychologist, not by being female), and so are
several significant male characters.
But the rest of the book is much closer to timeless. What is a sapient
being, and how can you define that? And when an awful lot of money and
power rests on the planet having no sapient natives, who's going to
want a hand in that definition and what will they do to make it go
their way?
This is a book popular with libertarians, who presumably haven't
noticed that the company is entirely capable of walking all over the
good-guy rugged individualists, having bought the local government,
and the only thing that prevents it from doing so is an independent
judiciary backed up by a higher level of government.
Also helped, of course, by the book's one blatant impossibility, the
reliable lie detector ("polyencephalographic veridicator") – and
that's another angle, because like any good SF author Piper doesn't
just say "oh, they have this", he works out that you'll still need
courts and their formalities even when you can be quite certain of
whether someone is telling the truth.
All right, the good guys are all unambiguously good and the bad guys
are all bumbling idiots (except the company chief, who vanishes from
the story at about the two-thirds mark). And the idea of a sapient
race having a formal status that's secondary relative to good old
humanity is, hmm, less than ideal. But the book works, from frontier
idyll to courtroom drama, and stands up to modern eyes a great deal
better than much other SF from this era and later.
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