The Great Fetish

The Great Fetish is a science fiction novel by American writer L. Sprague de Camp. It was first published in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine in two parts, as "Heretic in a Balloon" and "The Witches of Manhattan", in the issues for winter, 1977, and January/February, 1978, respectively.^[1] It was subsequently published in book form in hardcover by Doubleday in 1978 and in paperback by Pocket Books in 1980.^[1][2] An E-book edition was published by Gollancz's SF Gateway imprint on September 29, 2011 as part of a general release of de Camp's works in electronic form.^[3][4] It has also been translated into German.^[1]

Plot

The book is both an adventure story and a satire on the scientific dispute over Creationism. It is set on the planet Kforri, where descendants of space travelers from Earth have reverted to a pre-technological society. The truth of their origin has faded into legend, and as a result the story of the space voyage and the scientific theory of evolution have become competing accounts of the genesis of humanity.

In an ironic reversal, the Religionists hold that man evolved from the native animals of Kforri, while skeptics against the received dogma, known as the Anti-Evolutionists, are more open to the spaceflight theory.

Schoolteacher Marko Prokopiu, has been found guilty of teaching the Anti-Evolutionist heresy, as established by the Holy Syncretic Church, but escapes from prison. He embarks on a quest to discover the truth by finding the "Great Fetish", said to contain the real story. A parallel motivation is to recover his wife Petronela, who has run off with his friend Chet Mongami during his imprisonment.

Marko joins a caravan and falls in with the philosopher Doctor Halran, a professor who is experimenting with a new hot air balloon.

The two are launched in the balloon and land by accident on the Island of Mnaen, populated only by female "witches" who guard The Great Fetish. This is revealed to be a collection of documents with microscopically-reduced writing. Escaping from the witches, who follow the worship of the cult of Einstein, they attend a great philosophical convention.

Using an experimental microscope being demonstrated at the convention, the documents reveal information about the origins of Kforri, validating the truth of the anti-evolutionists. They further show that Kforri gained its name from that given by the discovering expedition (K40 became Kforri), and that the expedition members disagreed and dispersed. They eventually formed nations with cultures and languages derived from their native ones. For instance, the name of Marko's home province Vizantia is derived from Byzantium and the Island of Mnaen from Manhattan. The names of other locales are also corruptions of earthly originals, such as Afka (Africa), Lann (Los Angeles), Niok (New York), and Vien (Vienna).

Using the documents, the inhabitants of Kforri rapidly advance their technology. They eventually hope to build spaceships to travel back to Earth.

Reception

Critical response to the novel ranged from mixed to negative. Kirkus Reviews called it "[f]limsy and pointless."^[5] Publishers Weekly, while characterizing it as a "happy combination of gentle satire and light adventure," and its author as "an old pro" who "can be relied upon to entertain and amuse," felt that, notwithstanding, "in this case, he has nothing new to show us."^[6] Donna J. McColman, writing for Library Journal, found the book an "attempt at satire [that] falls flat. Impossible to take seriously, [and not] particularly funny or telling as a spoof of the sword and sorcery genre ... The author uses all the contrivances of the genre, but the book merely comes across as a poorly written example, not a takeoff."^[7] Mel Gilden in the Los Angeles Times thought it "an adventure with a thin overlay of science-fiction ... "lack[ing] energy and excitement [with] [t]he climactic revelation ... telegraphed from the beginning." He singled out for criticism the hero's "escape from jail, using—I swear—a file baked into a cake by his mother," and the author's "juvenile mock-Victorian writing style."^[8]

These mainstream critiques were echoed within the genre. Frederick Patten in Science Fiction & Fantasy Book Review called the book "amusing enough in its own right, but extremely lightweight when compared to de Camp's best" works, among which he counted The Tritonian Ring, The Hand of Zei, and The Fallible Fiend. He rated it "all froth and no substance ... [a]n enjoyable time-killer." More positively, he did consider it "all great fun: Marko makes an amusingly reluctant hero, buffeted by fate from one exasperating contretemps to another. De Camp gleefully lampoons many of the more ridiculous aspects of our own culture, from campus radicalism to New York City to religious dogmatism." He felt its "light humor and iconoclasm should make the novel especially popular with high school and college readers."^[9]

Note

De Camp previously wrote about the actual struggle between science and creationism in The Great Monkey Trial (1968), a non-fiction account of the 1925 test case against Tennessee's Butler Act, which made the teaching of human evolution in that state illegal.^[10]

References

External links

• The Great Fetish title listing at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database