An Earth Gone Mad by Roger Dee

Roger Dee (full name Roger Dee Aycock (1914-2014)) was a reasonably prolific author of the late 40s and early 50s, working mainly for the lesser magazines of the field. He published close to 40 stories, the great bulk between 1949 and 1955, though the latest story listed in the ISFDB is from a 1971 issue of Worlds of Tomorrow. What I've seen of his work was pretty routine stuff, with the occasional cute idea but no better than mediocre writing and mediocre plotting. An Earth Gone Mad is his only SF novel, though I can find evidence of some work for other genres.

The story opens with Paul Shannon leaving Io after having been marooned there for 2 years. (Dee's Io is apparently possessed of a breathable atmosphere and human-edible plants and animals, albeit in a generally hostile environment.) With the help of an inscrutable rocklike alien, he has repaired his crashed spaceship, and he limps back to Earth. But once on Earth, he finds that strange changes have occurred. A growing proportion of the population seems hypnotized into serenity and passiveness by the influence of some strange cubes that dropped from space -- these are the Cubists. (I don't know if Dee intended a reference to the modern art movement.) The rest of the US seems split down the middle -- the corporate oriented "Syndicate" is pro-Cubist, more or less, because the Cubists make tractable workers, while the labor unions are opposed, because Cubists are taking the jobs of ordinary workers. The government tries to toe a middle line.

Shannon's instincts are strongly anti-Cubist, especially after he encounters his fiancee, who has become a Cubist, and is horribly changed thereby. He becomes obsessed with finding a way to counteract the effects of the Cubes. But he also finds himself mysteriously pursued by several different agents -- people from the government, the unions, and the syndicate (including his Space Service employers). And he has been impersonated, with his stand in having delivered a rabid anti-Cube rant during a staged interview. Finally, he is picked up by a beautiful, fiery, young woman, Ruth Nugent, who takes him to another center of resistance to the Cubes -- this a group of scientists (including Ruth's physicist fiance) who have built a NAFAL spaceship with which they plan to flee to Procyon and set up a new colony free of the Cubes. They want Shannon's help -- but he is convinced that there way is cowardly, and that something must be done to free the Cubists from the baleful influence of the Cubes.
The rest of the novel, then, consists of lots of running around, with Shannon encountering representatives of each of the main power centers, and also exploring (with Ruth) an installation, a Peace Center, home to many Cubists. Things seem stranger and stranger -- obviously some weird conspiracy is involved. Could Shannon's old friend Gil Lucas be involved? And why do people seem to be secretly almost herding Shannon? And why is Ruth Nugent both so infuriating and so attractive? Anyway, all leads to a somewhat twisty resolution, complete with some philosophizing about the proper order of society, the place of humans in the Galaxy, etc. etc. It ends up ironically a curious pairing to an Asimov novel, not because it much resembles The Rebellious Stars, but rather because some of the ideas considered resemble ideas from much later Asimov novels like Foundation's Edge and Foundation and Earth. All in all I don't think it a very good novel, but it's a tolerable fast-moving read, with at least a brushing against potentially interesting SFnal ideas. Not really recommend on the whole, but not without some redeeming value. (Strange At Ecteban)