THE GREEN ODYSSEY - Book review

Philip José Farmer’s 1957 debut novel The Green Odyssey is a classic space opera of the period. Astronaut Alan Green (‘Greed conquered more frontiers than curiosity’ (p74) is stranded on a primitive unknown planet and after some minor adventures ends up becoming a gigolo of a duchess and when he’s not busy with her he’s married to a beautiful slave woman, Amra. At court he learns about two other stranded astronauts at a distant city; his hope was that he could get them to take him off-planet. Guiltily he fretted about leaving his wife and two children (one of them being his).

He escapes, hiding on a ship. These vessels are on wheels and driven by sail-power across a vast plain of Xurdimur. His family have stowed away onboard too!

Getting to the city that holds the two astronauts prisoner isn’t easy; Green has to contend with mysterious floating islands, cannibals (‘these painted people were cannibals and made no bones about it’ (p84)) and pirates, the latter involving a battle on the plain reminiscent of two galleons at sea exchanging broadsides. It’s quite an odyssey.

Maybe the start is slow, but it soon livens up, and there’s humour along the way too; stick with it. It is possible that Farmer was attempting a pastiche of science fiction adventure of the period. Certainly he uses too many unpronounceable names (it’s as if he hit the typewriter keys at random):  Jugkaxtr and Zaxropatr (p9), Grizquetr (p20), Inzax and Anddonanarga (p21), iquogr and Zaceffucanquanr (p24), Booxotr (p69).

Farmer is quite inventive, however. This earthman ‘carried in his body a surgically implanted protoplasmic entity (Green dubbed it his Vigilante) which automatically analysed any invading microscopic organisms and/or viruses and manufactured antibodies to combat them. It lived in the space created by the removal of his appendix’ (p32) – an updated variant of the human white blood cells. Like cancerous white cells, however, ‘deprived of food, it would survive by living upon Green’s tissue. A Vigilante wasn’t all advantage; it had its dangers’ (p150).

‘Everywhere that space travelling Earthmen had gone, they had found that about every fourth inhabitable planet was populated by men of their species’ (p34) suggesting that mankind had seeded planets but in many instances had reverted to less technological cultures.

Green is sometimes overconfident and not beyond false modesty, but you can’t help but root for him.

The so-called ‘roaming islands’ (p73) are believed to be mythical – but Green and Amra soon find out that they are real – and to my mind reminded me of Philip Reeve’s Mortal Engines books (2001-2006) which feature mobile steampunk cities – and in a neat twist prove their salvation.