Sold-For a Spaceship (Venture SF Books) [Paperback]

OK so I may be easily pleased but I love the idea that the human race would be better than we see it today if only .... Philip E High is a master of variation around this theme and has found yet another approach to unlocking our better selves. I find it uplifting as a thought and I like to re-visit this book at least once a year. The action moves at a good pace. You warm to the central characters and if you didn't understand the concept of symbiosis at the start you certainly will by the end.

Took me a while to track this down - it's been out of print for so long. Philip E High is a seriously underrated author, and this book is fantastic; a great global catastrophe book written long before the hollywood genre existed. His passes at romantic sub-plots are a little on the clumsy side, but as for imagination - I still get lost inside his bizarre world-gone-and-changed-completely, and with a lovely twist at the end.

Go on - buy it and make his retirement a happy one.

An entertaining Science Fiction adventure in which an excellent storyline largely makes up for terrible science.

The story starts with Doctor Mark Clifton, one of the central characters, being awakened by machines after a long period of suspended animation in a shelter deep undergound. At some unspecified point in the late 20th or early 21st century, human civilisation had become aware that a catastrophe was about to hit our solar system. There had been about a decade's warning, which was just enough time to build vast underground shelters with suspended animation facilites for the majority of humanity.

When the machines try to awaken the human race many years later, the catastrophe itself has completely changed the face of the earth, destroying many of the shelters in the process, which combined with equipment failures over the passage of time, and imperfections in the suspended animation process, mean that only a small proportion of mankind is successfully revived. The few million survivors find themselves struggling to cope with limited supplies and equipment in a very different and hostile world - in which mankind is not the only sentient species.

To survive on this new earth will require a new human race, one which is willing to use new abilities which some of the survivors start to experience, and forge a new relationship with the other species on the planet. Those who are unwilling or unable to do this may find, as the title of the book suggests, that they have sold their birthright for a spaceship.

The story is exciting and keeps you turning the pages. Characters and relationships depicted in the book are at best superficial, but that doesn't spoil the book because essentially this is an adventure story and most of the people in the story are ordinary people trying to cope with shattering events.

The science, however, is poor even by the standards of 1970 when the book came out. The catastrophe which drives mankind to take extreme measures to survive is - wait for it - a comet passing directly through the solar system with "no actual collision" but "too damn close for comfort."

Oh honestly!

Comets are part of the solar system. Many comets pass directly through the inner solar system once in each of their long orbits: for example, Halley's comet pases through the inner solar system four times in every three centuries. Most such passages produce nothing more than a spectacular light display or some minor fluctuations in the weather, and not always even that.

So "Too damn close for comfort" really doesn't cut it: to produce the sort of cataclysm described in this book, wrecking shelters deep underground, completely altering the geography of land and sea, and destablising the planet for a millenium, a comet or very significant fragments of it, WOULD have to actually collide with the earth.

The story also includes vastly accelerated evolution by both plants and animals in a way which bears no resemblance whatsoever to any reputable scientific theories of either contemporary biology at the time the book was written or anything which has been suggested since. And there is no plausible explanation of the new faculties which the humans in the story mysteriously develop.

One other content warning - this book was in line with or even possibly a bit ahead of its' time in its' attitude to racism, but things have moved on in the past forty years. Certain dialogue in the book is now behind the curve and might upset some 21st century readers. In particular the main hero of the book, Rutledge, regularly exchanges mutual banter and insults with one of his friends, Dooge, who is black, and these include racial epithets on both sides. The book justifies this on the grounds that the latter didn't mind the insults because he knew that Rutledge saw him as a man, and not as a black man. It was possible for someone who was genuinely anti-racist to write things like that in the early 70's, to a rather greater extent than would be thinkable today.

There is some good humour in this book, including clever mockery both of the way politicians and bureaucrats work, and of the attitudes of men and women to each other.

I used to love Philip E High's science fiction stories at the time they were written, mostly around the 1970's. Many of them, like this one, have dated, this book is not the only example of the way the science in his books was not always brilliant even by the standards of 1970. Some, though by no means all, of his stories also present humans as uniquely talented in a way which jars a little now.

However, High's best stories have not dated and even those which have, like this one, are still fun to read.

Other books by Philip E High which I can particularly recommend include "The Time Mercenaries" and "Come, Hunt an Earthman (Venture SF Books)."