QuasitQuasit's Daily Book Recommendations: "The Great Explosion" (1962) by Eric Frank Russell
This is me moving my daily book recommendations from kolektiva to beige.party. If you haven't seen them before, I've done about 50 so far; it's a point of pride to me that I haven't missed a day since I started. Not bad, huh?
You should be able to read all of the previous book recommendations at #QuasitBookRecs .
Just in case anyone new is reading this, I'm an old bookworm who has always loved old books. I have a naturally high reading speed and a kind of freaky memory, so I was basically born as a human library. It helped that I grew up before the Internet and without TV for quite a while (we only had 12 channels back then anyway). So I did over a thousand book recommendations over on Reddit before it went rotten and I left.
I love science fiction, fantasy, mysteries, humor, YA, children's books, manga, graphic novels and almost everything else.
Okay, on to today's recommendation! What will it be? Well, YOU already know since I just posted the title at the top. 😁
I have a special place in my heart for Eric Frank Russell's "The Great Explosion"; in it, Russell created a world that I want to live in. It's a funny, thought-provoking, and ultimately very •moving• book. You may have noticed that I say that about a lot of books that I recommend; I may be a bit soft-hearted, but to me the greatest quality any piece of art can have is to touch the heart.
I'll take a moment to also note that it's a comparatively short book: 163 pages, depending on what format you're reading. Back in the old days (for those of you who aren't old), the publishing industry hadn't dedicated itself to converting the world's forests into profit. So books were generally smaller, not the back-breaking tomes they sell today. Okay, I'm actually not sure WHY books are so much longer now, but it's definitely not because they're •better•–that's for sure! And believe me, quantity does NOT have to equal quality.
Perhaps a hundred years into the future, a cheap and easy FTL (faster than light) drive is developed. Earth is virtually depopulated as every splinter group imaginable hauls up their stakes and takes to the stars. It turns out that habitable planets are pretty common, and colonies are established across the galaxy.
Hundreds of years years later Earth has established a world-wide government. Spaceships are sent out to gather the far-flung colonies into a new empire. But the colonies have developed their own societies and have their own ideas. Centuries of isolation (apparently spaceships don't last a long time) has caused all sorts of cultural divergence. It's a lovely concept.
[A veritable spray of Blieder-driven ships shot outward as every family, cult, group or clique that imagined it could do better someplace else took to the star-trails. The restless, the ambitious, the malcontents, the martyrs, the eccentrics, the antisocial, the fidgety and the just plain curious, away they fled by the dozens, hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands.
In less than a century fifty percent of the human race left aged and autocratic Terra and blew itself all over the star-field, settling wherever they could give free vent to their ideas and establish their prejudices. This was the end-product of the obsession of a penny-levitator. It was written down in history as The Great Explosion.
It weakened Terra for four hundred years. Then came the time to pick up the bits and pieces ...]
Tenth Engineer Harrison is one of the people assigned to one of the ships sent to gather in Earth's lost sheep. It would be fair to call him a geek; he travels with his bicycle, even in space, and he's not a particularly military man. But he does as he's ordered.
[News-channel commentators, lost for suitable superlatives, had repeatedly described the vessel as "one to make the senses boggle." Always willing to do some fervent boggling, the public had turned up in its thousands. A solid mass of people stood behind the barriers and studied the ship with the bovine stares of good, obedient, uncomplaining taxpayers. It did not occur to any of them that somebody had paid for this gigantic vision or that they had been stung good and hard in their individual and collective wallets.
People were momentarily incapable of deep thoughts about cost. The flag had been raised, the bands were playing and this was a patriotic occasion. It is conventional that one does not think vulgar thoughts of money on a patriotic occasion; the individual who chooses such a time to count his cash is by definition a traitor or a no-good bum.]
The first planet they reach is unique; it's a former prison planet, where some of Earth's criminal refuse was deposited. Twenty generations have resulted in a worldwide culture that's basically built on gangs and criminality. Organizing them into a single worldwide government for Terra to incorporate is clearly a VERY long-term project, so a team is dropped off and the ship moves on.
I just realized that I have NO IDEA if there's a character limit on beige.party! I hope there isn't. But just in case, I'll switch to terse mode.
The next planet was colonized by nudists. Their descendants are magnificently healthy and muscular, but to them clothing is obscene and the Terrans are shrimpy, probably diseased.
It's the last planet that *I* want to move to. It was colonized by dissenters of all kinds, and seems to be populated by eccentrics. The society they've developed might not be practical...but maybe it is. And it offers an idea of freedom that's incredibly appealing.
But I'll stop there. Suffice it to say that it's an imaginative, fun, and incredibly FUNNY book.
The full text of the book is available to read free online at https://web.archive.org/web/20050315170821/http://tmh.floonet.net/books/tgetoc.html . It's often back in physical print, and it's available commercially as an ebook from the major ebook publishers. I still see it in used book shops fairly often, too.
And of course you can borrow it for free from the Internet Archive!
https://archive.org/details/bwb_O8-BOX-419
Happy reading! 🤓📖
P.S.– F.-I.W.
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