Book review: “Virgin Planet” by Poul Anderson

There’s a running gag through Poul Anderson’s 1959 science-fiction novel Virgin Planet, but, before I get to that, the scene needs to be set.

Davis Bertram — in our era, he would be Bertram Davis, but, by his time, the cultural norm is to start a name with the family name — is something of a playboy who’s “a natural-born pilot” with a hot-rod spaceship.

He decides to go alone into an unexplored corner of space, and, after landing on a likely enough Earth-ish planet, he finds himself captured by Corporal Maiden Barbara Whitley of Freetoon.

After spending a night alone in a stockade, stripped of his clothing, Davis gets a visit from a number of young attractive female warriors.

“What’s going on?” he croaked. “Who are you?”

“F-Father!” stammered one of the girls. “It talks.”

She spoke Basic — a slurred, archaic form but it was the Basic of Earth and all human planets. She must be human, thought Davis weakly; no alien was that humanoid.

 

“Their likeness”

They march him out through the town and all he sees are women and children, and something about them strikes him:

Their likeness. Women and children — all female, the children — seemed to be cast from a few hundred molds. Take two from the same mold, like those gawping dairymaid types over there, and the only difference was age or scars….

Indeed, the redhaired huntress who captured him, Barbara Whitley, has a cousin Valeria Whitley who looks like a twin. And he will soon find out that there are Udalls who all look like each other, and Burkes, and Dyckmans, and so on — clans of identical multiples.

 

“As human as you are”

At a meeting in front of the town leaders and everyone else in the village, Davis is told that he’s a Monster. He responds, “I’m as human as you are!”

“Look here,” Barbara said reasonably, “we’re not blind. I admit you’re not unlike a person. You have two legs and five fingers and no feathers. But you’re bigger than any of us, and haven’t got any more breasts than a ten-year-old.”

“I should hope not!” said Davis.

But Barbara doesn’t follow up on that last comment. Something’s caught her eye about the naked Davis.

“In fact—” Barbara scratched her neck, puzzledly, and pointed, “Just what is that? Do you fight with it?”

“It doesn’t look prehensile,” said the blond captain.

Anderson is playing this for laughs, and the reader is enjoying the ride.

 

“No Men”

Davis is totally confused, and so are Barbara and the rest of the townswomen.

And then he begins to have a glimmer and starts to question Barbara about what a Man is. She says that’s a human male. And what do animal males do? They fertilize the female.

“All right. I just wanted to get that settled. Now — have you ever seen a human male before?”

“Certainly not. You must indeed be from far away, Monster. There are no Men on all Atlantis.”

 

“No mammals”

Atlantis is a planet settled three hundred years ago when a spaceship carrying a shipment of women to some other astral destination crash-landed. Soon enough, the memory of men became a myth. “Men are powerful, and beautiful,” Davis is told.

And there is something else.

Something came back to him. In the few hours he’d been on Atlantis, before this Barbara wench caught him, he had seen plenty of animal life. Lizard-like forms, fish in a brook, flying birds and flightless birds. Some of the earthbound avians had been the size of buffalo.

But no mammals…Since the mammal is the only terrestroid life form whose males — apart from all secondary characteristics — are conspicuously male, it was understandable that a certain confusion existed on Atlantis.

But there are children. So, Davis eventually realizes that the ones called the Doctors at the remains of the spaceship must have a parthenogenesis machine that enables the cloning of individual women. Hence, the small number of genotypes. Hence, the Burkes who all look the same, and the Whitleys, like Barbara and Valeria.

 

“Prove it”

At the meeting with the leaders, Davis is still trying to prove that he’s a Man, not a Monster, when Elinor Dyckman, the pretty-girl bedmate of the Udall in charge of the village, comes up with an idea.

“It says it is a Man,” Elinor waggled her lashes at Davis. “Let it prove it.”

“How?” demanded Davis eagerly.

“Barbara,” said Elinor with scientific detachment.

“What?”

“Certainly,” said Elinor. “Just fertilize the corporal.”

And that’s the start of Anderson’s running gag through Virgin Planet.

 

“The grace to blush”

In this case, Davis demurs, not feeling at all comfortable about doing the deed in front of a thousand Atlantis women.

But, over the course of the next a hundred-plus pages — while different factions among the Atlantans fight to gain hold of the spaceman or to kill him — Davis initiates or is pushed into situations in which some lucky Atlantis woman comes very close to being introduced to the wonders of heterosexual sex.

This happens seven more times — with Barbara, with her cousin Valeria, even with Elinor Dyckman — and, each time, there’s an interruption.

At the end of the book, dice are being thrown for the right — without an interruption.

Davis Bertram stood aside and waited. He had the grace to blush.

 

Patrick T. Reardon

1.6.26