"People Minus X" Raymond Z. Gallun

 

The hero of the novel is Ed Doukas, who is the nephew of the scientist whom everyone blames for the destruction of the Moon (though it's never clear if the scientist is actually guilty); this uncle survived, because he had left the Moon the day before the experiment. Soon, the government learns of the survival of the uncle, and he goes underground. Ed soon finds himself a pariah due to his relation to his uncle. As the story proceeds, there begins to be a debate, then more animosity between people who are natural, and the re-created android personalities, until it begins to resemble McCarthyism, as the naturally-born people believe the androids want to take over the world. Ed learns where his uncle is hiding, and decides to stand with the androids, since the natural-born are so hysterical and are becoming luddites, i.e. they are against all science. Soon, there is a war between the two sides, and that fills up the rest of the story.

The plot is straightforward enough. Ed Dukas' Uncle, Mitch Prell, is a scientist whose creations include Vitaplasm, a synthetic but living flesh which can not only aid with repairing limbs or organs but - once one's body has been screened - can reproduce a copy if the human original is killed.

These bodies are stronger, faster and can absorb light and radiation as fuel for the body. Prell has also developed android bodies for the same purpose. As Ed's father is dead, but wasn't screened, Prell collects as much information as he can with a view to having Ed's father resurrected.

Not long after however, there is an explosion on the moon related to one of Prell's experiments and the Moon disintegrates into a ring of asteroids around the Earth, but only after a large number of them have already hit the Earth causing mass fatalities and chaos. Everyone blames Prell for the disaster and for the fact that victims of this holocaust are returning from the dead, something to which a vocal minority fiercely object.

Ed and his mother are forced to leave and live in the asteroids for a while until she receives a message and tells her son that they have to return.

Ed's father has been resurrected as a Vitaplast human it seems. but is not the same man. Ed decides to accept him though, as do other families whose relatives, killed by some of the moon debris, begin to return to them.

Slowly tensions rise as Human purists begin to campaign against the Vitaplast and android returnees, a campaign which escalates to the point of open warfare.

Prell is believed to be still alive and one day Ed finds the word 'Nipper' - Prell's nickname for his nephew, written in ink on a blank sheet of paper.

From herein on, Ed is on a mission to find his uncle and try and put a stop to the madness that has been unleashed on the Earth. It's a journey that takes him and his girlfriend to Mars where they are given knowledge and power that could halt the war that is about to erupt.

It's a marvelous little buried gem, this; a colourful and thrilling story which - serendipitously- echoes the the rhetoric of the current US Christian Right in their hate-filled pogroms against people whom they believe have no right to exist.

The dialogue is a little strange, even for the Nineteen Fifties. Oddly this seems to imbue the book with its own character. The narrative packs a huge amount into a minimal number of pages and - whether consciously or not - the author manages to make a telling point about how the US deals with the problem of xenophobia within its borders. You push all those 'different people' onto a ship and send them off on a one-way trip to the planets of Sirius.

But hey, that was the Fifties. Sixty years later we are still seeing people doing the same thing in Syria and in Europe. These 'different people' aren't wanted and are being told to move on or go back.

They'd maybe welcome a giant spaceship to Sirius. (Roddy Williams, GoodReads)