Deathworld

Deathworld, by Harry Harrison, was a 1961 Hugo Award nominee. In Deathworld, gambler Jason dinAlt receives an irresistible offer: to run up a huge winning streak to get enough money to save the planet Pyrrus. dinAlt, whose psychic talent helps him hold on to winning streaks, is bored with his cycle of resort-planet gambling, so he insists on returning to Pyrrus, where everything is deadly and dinAlt expects to be excited by the challenge.

First of all, huge spoiler, as it was one of my favorite things about the book: I loved the idea of a psychic planet, where literally everything around you is capable of responding to the thoughts you put out. What would you do if you could walk outside and...commune with your lawn? With the birds in your shrubs, the insects, the squirrels, the stray cat down the street? Pyrrus obviously took it in a different direction, and I enjoyed the wide range of perils Harrison imagined to play out the conflict between the planet's native denizens and its human colonists. On the other hand, I wished there had been more imagination in the creation of the grubbers: these folks had that chance to work directly with their surroundings, and apparently all settled for what was essentially a hunter-gatherer existence. To be honest, I found the entire set up of military-industrial city set at odds with the planet versus the bucolic grubber villages a little simplistic. I felt like there was room for nuance (psychic planet, people!) and to push at or complicate the boundaries of the two groups.

I also greatly enjoyed the depiction of how committed the Pyrran colonists were to the idea that they could beat the planet. The mental break Pyrrans experienced when forced to confront the fact that all of their hostile measures weren't even keeping their population static was handled beautifully, and I think underscored the extent to which the colonists were wholly invested in the rightness of their fight to survive. That they would need to believe that they were winning to continue fighting with that kind of commitment made complete sense to me, even as individual colonists took actions that belied that belief, like Kerk Pyrrus' purchase of the enormous set of arms dinAlt's win funded.

I liked the way Harrison had dinAlt humbled by Pyrrus; he's the omniscient outsider, able to solve all the planet's problems in a single bound! He decides to go to Pyrrus because he thinks it will be a new challenge, and he's sure that he is the equal of the bad ass Pyrrans. I enjoyed how quickly he learns that he was wrong.

This was the first book where I felt like I could not ignore the flat depiction of female characters--okay, really just the female character, Meta. Some of the flatness is absolutely justified by the story: the Pyrrans on-planet are practical to the exclusion of everything else. You don't need a great personality to survive, and in fact, it will probably distract you or others around you, which will kill you/them. I get it. And I get that, in contrast and to demonstrate how the Pyrran mindset constricts Pyrran expession of self, off-planet Meta has to be more of a "normal" person, recognizable as a woman. But off-planet Meta seemed a stereotype: the pretty, willing, semi-alien female. Although I'm quite sure some of the other supporting female characters I've read already could be accused of the same, Meta was the first one I felt really was just arm candy. I liked the super-capable on-planet Meta much better.

On the whole, I enjoyed a lot of the ideas in this book, but felt like a huge opportunity was lost in choosing to focus on the Pyrran fight to survive rather than exploring what could be done with a psychic planet. Deathworld spawned a series of books, and Harrison may have saved those ideas for later installments. If any of the other Deathworld novels show up on my lists, I will certainly find out!

The next book up for 1961 is Poul Anderson's The High Crusade.