Tag Archives: legacy

Book Review of “Half Past Human” by T.J. Bass

half past human

© James Pyles

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Half Past Human is a dystopian novel by T.J. Bass (Thomas Joseph Bassler) that I found recommended on social media by science fiction writer Neal Asher. The prolific Asher seems to read as much science fiction as he produces and I’ve followed a number of his suggestions in the past.

This 1971 story starts out as a typical “after-the-end-of-the-world” dystopic tale where much of humanity lives in a series of worldwide underground cities collectively known as “the Hive.” They follow an ultimate authority called the “Big-ES” and their lives are programmed by that authority for various functions. They only reproduce when Big-ES sanctions certain citizens to be “polarized” or to develop sexually as male and female. Otherwise, they are neutered four-toed Nebishes.

On the surface, vast crops are grown to support the Nebish population, tended to and harvested by intelligent machines. Also on the surface are large groups of five-toed “Buckeyes” who live a stone age level of existence. Where the Nebishes value community and compliance above all else, the Buckeyes cherish individuality and freedom (you see where this is going?).

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Senegalia and the Gods

fairy

Photo credit: Ingrid Endel

If Senegalia were human, she would look like an eleven-year-old girl, but even though she was the youngest in her family, she was over three-hundred-years old.

That’s not as long as it seems, since for the first one-hundred-and-fifty years after emerging from her pupa stage, she fluttered about the nest, and later, the verdant wooded high-canopy with the other overly curious and somewhat clumsy adolescents, a collection of fireflies, each glowing some shade of amber, sapphire, emerald, or ruby, no larger than three-year-old children, cavorting nude, for clothing was a human concern, and existing in a state both being careless and carefree.

For Senegalia, she believed her life was one of eternal play with the other nestlings, gossamer wings fluttering as fast as invisibility, racing around the feusha blooms, dodging errant moonbeams, their overarching background of earth tones and the deep greens of a mythical rain forest, competing to be the fastest, the most acrobatic, and certainly majestically fearless fliers. Of course, the grown-ups were always watching them, secure in the knowledge that they were all safe in the fantasy pocket universe, nestled in a depression of local timespace right next to the larger quantum reality of their greatest enemy, humans.

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