Of Men And Monsters

First the bad news: Earth has been conquered by gigantic aliens. The good news is that humanity survives. The further bad news is that it survives inside the aliens’ walls, stealing crumbs, dodging traps and being discussed by the new owners in roughly the tone once reserved for mice behind the refrigerator.

Generations have passed since the conquest, and the remaining humans have adapted magnificently. They live in burrows, worship badly remembered fragments of history and conduct perilous expeditions into the terrifying open spaces of Monster Territory—which may, from the Monsters’ point of view, simply be the bit between the sofa and the kitchen. Humanity has lost the planet, most of its technology and any realistic understanding of what happened, but it has retained religion, committees and the conviction that its own little group is the only one doing civilisation properly.

Eric the Only belongs to a tribe of 128 people which modestly calls itself Mankind. He is about to undergo his initiation into the Male Society by carrying out a Theft: entering Monster Territory and returning with something useful. If successful, he will become Eric the Eye, acquire adult status and perhaps impress the young woman who currently regards him with the measured enthusiasm due to a boy who has not yet stolen anything from a giant alien.

The men perform the dangerous raids and tell heroic stories about them. The Women’s Society preserves knowledge, practises medicine and quietly keeps everybody alive. This arrangement is treated as the natural and eternal order of things, despite having developed among 128 frightened people living in insulation. Give humanity a few generations in a cupboard and it will produce sacred traditions concerning which shelf belongs to whom.

Eric’s uncle, Thomas the Trap-Smasher, has reached an uncomfortable conclusion. Humanity’s precious Ancestor-Science failed to stop the Monsters the first time, so recovering it may not be quite the triumphant solution everyone assumes. Perhaps the only way to defeat the aliens is to understand and steal Alien-Science instead. This is dangerously close to an original thought, and Eric’s society has developed the usual efficient methods for dealing with those.

Once Eric ventures beyond the walls he discovers other human communities, rival beliefs and several incompatible versions of unquestionable truth. Each group is certain that it alone represents civilisation, while the Monsters continue exterminating all of them without showing much interest in their theological differences. Eric’s simple initiation expands into a journey through a world far larger, stranger and more ridiculous than his tribal education allowed.

William Tenn takes the grand alien-invasion novel and views it from skirting-board height. The result is both an adventure and a gleeful satire in which mankind has been reduced to vermin but remains magnificently self-important. The aliens possess the planets and the technology; the humans possess courage, ingenuity and an almost supernatural ability to start arguing before the immediate danger has passed.

This VGSF edition is in As New condition, an unusually pristine survivor from 1989. Unlike Mankind, it has not spent generations inside a wall, lost the secrets of its ancestors or been forced to steal supplies from an enormous extraterrestrial kitchen. It is simply a remarkably fresh copy of a clever, funny and pleasingly peculiar science-fiction novel—and probably the safest available method of entering Monster Territory.

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