A WORLD LOST by James B. Johnson

[Evelyn C Leeper +1 908 957 2070]

A WORLD LOST by James B. Johnson
A book review by Evelyn C. Leeper
Copyright 1991 Evelyn C. Leeper

I recently reviewed S. C. Sykes's RED GENESIS and said it was being
compared to some of Heinlein's work. Well, if Sykes is writing neo-Heinlein
adult novels, Johnson is writing neo-Heinlein juveniles.

Yes, our hero Rusty is supposedly 29 years old, but he acts about half
that. (And, no, Rusty does not have a dog named Rin Tin Tin.) He is a
spacer at a time when spacers are the outcasts of humanity and arrives home
after a trip only to discover that "home" isn't there any more. There is
not some mere Wolfeian concept--the whole planet and its sun are gone. So
Rusty starts wending his way through a Laumerian bureaucracy to try to get
help in finding his planet.

As a juvenile, this book probably passes muster. The strange dietary
habits of our hero, centering around peanut butter, seem aimed far more at
an adolescent crowd than a group of adult readers. There are all the stock
elements: boy has girlfriend back home to whom he's been engaged since
childhood, boy meets beautiful female secret agent, boy and secret agent
fight the system to solve the mystery (using boy's spaceship with
intelligent talking computer), etc. All the "etc." is predictable too. The
science, however, leaves a lot to be desired, even in a juvenile. The Plex
Net, a network of matter transmission booths that have all but totally
replaced classic (albeit faster-than-light) space travel, is never
convincingly explained. On page 35, we find out Rusty is on a planet "a few
hundred thousand miles in circumference." This is (conservatively) ten
times the circumference of Earth and hence one thousand times the volume.
Assuming the same average density, therefore, the gravity would be a hundred
times that of Earth (he's ten times further from the center) and, when you
add to that the atmospheric pressure you are likely to find, Rusty would be
a smudge on the ground. To get Earth's gravity you would need a totally
impossible average density. (Conveniently, Saturn has a circumference of
slightly more than 200,000 miles, putting it right in the ballpark. Even
with the lowest average density of any planet the solar system, Saturn
masses 95 times that of earth.)

A more serious objection--in terms of what I want young people to
learn--is in how Rusty evaluates people. On seeing one up-until-now
ambiguous character happily playing with his niece, Rusty says (as first-
person narrator), "People with these kinds of values were not inimical to us
and the galaxy. Or so I hoped." Even with that qualifier, Johnson seems to
have forgotten the lessons of history: "That one may smile, and smile, and
be a villain." Many of the Nazi war criminals had very happy, loving home
lives.

Okay, maybe all this is overanalytical. As a time-killing book or a
juvenile this is okay, but I still can't really recommend it.

%T A WORLD LOST
%A James B. Johnson
%C New York
%D August 1991
%I DAW
%O paperback, US$4.50
%G ISBN 0-88677-498-5
%P 316pp

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* HAMLET, Act I, Scene 5

Evelyn C. Leeper | +1 908 957 2070 | att!mtgzy!ecl or e...@mtgzy.att.com