The Forgotten Planet
Been listening to a bunch of Librevox podcasts of Murray Leinster's (William Fitzgerald's) work. The tone varies quite a bit among his works, but the stories often seem to follow the trope of speculating male protagonist inventively resolving problems to the delight and frustration of love interest and/or fellows.
The Forgotten Planet is no exception. It takes place on a planet incompletely terraformed due to administrative error, where the highest form of life is amphibian, and giant fungi and arthropods dominate much of the wetter lowlands beneath a constantly overcast sky.
Events of the story take place 40 generations after a ship crash lands on the world, a time at which the survivors' descents have been reduced to a pre-stone age existence with almost no social structure by the brutal nature of survival among terrifying giant insects and spiders.
The plot involves the protagonist and his loosely knit band managing to improve their lot in life during a surprisingly short period of time through discovery, observation and improvisation.
Like a bunch of Leinster's other work, this contains a some well thought out musings of scientific principle, but mixed with bits of speculation and social understanding that have been since discredited. And a number of cliche old tropes crop up that may cause some eye rolling.
Still, I found The Forgotten Planet a pretty gripping yarn of savage survival in a weird world. Seems like good fodder for an RPG setting.
On Librevox: https://librivox.org/the-forgotten-planet-by-murray-leinster/
On Gutenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/41637
The trope of "space colonists descended from a high tech society fail to adequately socialize their young and future generations revert to a second stone age" is a good one. (Frankly, it's difficult to imagine playing a stone age game for long without discovering that the cave people are secretly descended from astronauts!)
ReplyDeleteThe idea of the "incompletely terraformed world" seems kind of novel though. We sort of get a primordial past full of giant monsters, but in a mix that never existed. That seems like an under-explored avenue for making a sci-fi stone age setting feel unique.
I agree at least to the extent that I love the idea of stone age games, but always want there to be some odd element to the setting. Giant arthropods and crashed spacecraft are a good fit.
DeleteThe take in this case really did feel pretty unique. The story was published in 1954, and wikipedia suggests a 1961 article by Sagan as an early date for serious terraforming discussion, so Forgotten Planet might have been ahead of its time in this regard.
Also, it seems like dinosaurs + cavemen are a more common trope. But the fairly well thought out explanation of the halted terraforming process actually does a pretty good job of justifying why specific types of organisms are and are not present in the story (basically nothing that has young requiring rearing, so no birds or mammals).