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Film This!
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| THE DEMON BREED James H. Schmitz Newton Abbot, Devon, UK: Readers Union, 1971 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
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| ASIN: B0007EAJ2S (1968 SFBC Edition) | 157pp. | HC | $? | |
As I noted in my review of The Witches of Karres, that novel is a rollicking good adventure story. However, I don't consider it Schmitz's best work. For that I turn to The Demon Breed — also a cracking good adventure tale, but with two additional elements to give it extra heft. First, it has a female hero; and second, it ends with a rather deep discussion of geopolitical1 philosophy.
It tells the story of how Nile Etland, a biochemist with Giard Pharmaceuticals, deals with alien invaders of a particularly nasty sort on the planet Nandy-Cline, aided only by three mutant otters and an aging scientist named Ticos Cay. Her success depends mainly on her knowledge of the planet's native animals and plants, her physical stamina, and her ability to bluff.
The planet's flora and fauna are well-developed and delightfully deadly to those unfamiliar with their habits — meaning the invaders. The main characters, Nile and Ticos, are not so well-developed, but their actions are logical within the context of the tale. That moves swiftly, drawing the reader along, and ends with an intriguing discussion on the aftermath of the invasion and the worth to Hub society of practical immortality, the quest for which is the reason Ticos Cay recently showed up on the planet to see Nile, his former student.
"You've been doing that for the past twenty years?" Nile asked. "Very nearly. Some thousands of lines of research are involved. It makes for a lengthy investigation." "I thought most of those lines of research were over on the crackpot side," she remarked. "A great many are. I still had to check them out. One problem here is that nobody can prove his method is going to work out indefinitely—no method has been practiced long enough for that." – Page 23 |
After the invasion has been expelled by a variety of forces, we are shown how the Federation Overgovernment contrives to minimize both Dr. Etland's role in its defeat and news coverage of the event in general. Then we see the leaders of an alien power, another potential enemy of the Federation, analyze this response and conclude that, as a result of Overgovernment policies, humans in general are too tough and adaptable to take on.2
For this novel, top marks.
Schmitz went on to write a number of other novels and stories with female protagonists. Regarding his literary legacy, Wikipedia quotes Gardner Dozois as follows:
"Schmitz was decades ahead of the curve in his portrayal of female characters—years before the Women's Movement of the '70s would come along to raise the consciousness of SF writers (or attempt to), Schmitz was not only frequently using women as the heroines in swashbuckling tales of interplanetary adventure—itself almost unheard of at the time—but he was also treating them as the total equal of the male characters, every bit as competent and brave and smart (and ruthless, when needs be), without saddling them with any of the "female weaknesses"—like an inclination to faint or cower under extreme duress, and/or seek protection behind the muscular frame of the Tough Male Hero) that would mar the characterization of women by some writers for years to come. (The Schmitz Woman, for instance, is every bit as tough and competent as the Heinlein Woman—who, to be fair, isn't prone to fainting in a crisis either—but without her annoying tendency to think that nothing in the universe is as important as marrying Her Man and settling down to have as many babies as possible.)[6]" – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_H._Schmitz#Legacy |
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