Starbrat

Starbrat by John Morressy is the sort of gloriously confident 1970s science-fiction novel that looks at an entire galaxy full of planets, alien races, pirates, slavers, mysterious technology and several centuries of human history and thinks: yes, 190 pages should be plenty.

Our hero is Del Whitby — more magnificently, Deliverance-from-the-Void Whitby — a young man from the quiet agricultural world of Gilead, where life is largely concerned with farming and not being kidnapped by interstellar slave traders. Unfortunately, the latter eventually becomes something of an issue. Torn away from his pleasantly uneventful existence, Del discovers that the wider galaxy is considerably less interested in peaceful rural living and considerably more interested in violence, slavery, piracy and the general business of making space travel unnecessarily unpleasant.

Fortunately, Del also discovers that he is rather better at surviving all this than anybody, including Del, had previously suspected.

What follows is a brisk tour through Morressy’s far-future universe, where humanity has long since abandoned Old Earth, populated distant worlds and mixed with an assortment of alien species whose existence strongly suggests that evolution has been allowed to work unsupervised. There are driveships roaming the starways, strange planets, stranger inhabitants, criminals, warriors and assorted people who really ought to have chosen quieter careers.

Del, meanwhile, progresses from abducted provincial innocent to somebody altogether more formidable, encountering enough danger, fighting and galactic skulduggery to make his original farming prospects seem increasingly attractive. Along the way Morressy manages to squeeze in adventure, humour, ideas about civilisation and human nature, and the occasional suggestion that mankind may have crossed hundreds of light-years without actually becoming noticeably more sensible.

This is one of those splendid old-school science-fiction novels in which the future is not depicted as a tasteful collection of minimalist white corridors populated by emotionally restrained scientists. It is big, scruffy, dangerous and busy. People have spaceships. Other people steal them. There are slave traders. There are pirates. There are exotic worlds. There are aliens. There is violence. There are philosophical considerations concerning the destiny of mankind. And, reassuringly, somebody somewhere is almost certainly making a catastrophically poor decision.

Originally published earlier in the 1970s and issued here by New English Library in 1979, Starbrat has all the appeal of the compact science-fiction paperback: an entire civilisation in something you can fit into a coat pocket. Modern epic fantasy would probably require seventeen volumes, three maps and an authorised companion podcast to cover the same amount of territory.

It is also very much a product of an era when publishers apparently believed that putting STARBRAT on the front of a paperback was sufficient explanation. And perhaps they were right. It certainly beats A Thoughtful Examination of Post-Diaspora Human Civilisation and Interstellar Social Conflict.

Beneath all the spacefaring excitement, however, Morressy is playing with some rather larger questions. Humanity has escaped Earth and spread across the stars, but distance alone has not cured greed, brutality, exploitation or the peculiar human enthusiasm for finding new and technologically sophisticated ways of behaving badly. The scenery changes; mankind remains suspiciously familiar.

So if your science fiction tastes run to enormous galaxies compressed into modest paperbacks, heroes unexpectedly discovering what they are capable of, alien worlds, slavers, pirates, fights, spaceships and occasional reflections upon whether humanity actually deserves the universe it has inherited, Starbrat should do very nicely.

This 1979 New English Library paperback is in Good condition: a respectable surviving example of late-1970s science fiction, from an age when futuristic adventure came printed on inexpensive paper, fitted conveniently into a pocket and did not require a streaming subscription.

ISBN: 0450042804.

Sold by Crappy Old Books — sending elderly literature back out into the universe, one slightly time-travelled paperback at a time.

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