Customer Reviews

Alien Minds

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This sequel to Evans' first novel, MAN OF MANY MINDS, is basically the same novel all over again. The hero, who has the supernatural mental ability to control the actions of animals, and look through their eyes, and also to dimly follow the unspoken thoughts of people, is sent, as an agent of an interstellar secret police force, to yet another alien planet where strange things are happening.

Just as in the first novel, an alien from a hitherto-unknown civilization is secretly meddling in the affairs of the natives. Unlike in the first novel, the natives are not humans, but rather hairy bigfoot-like creatures with a technology circa 1850 -- 1900 terrestrial.
As in the first novel, the hero's investigational procedures are so impossibly inept that he should have been bumped-off by the bad guys in a very early chapter.

It's not too great an exaggeration to say that pretty much nothing happens in the course of the novel. Once the hero gains access to the King (by rescuing him from a runaway horse, shades of Horatio Alger!), the adventure lumbers to a very unsuspenseful climax involving just one crazed bad guy with a ray gun, and then the hero conveniently discovers a new talent that presumably would have been the focus of a fortunately unwritten third novel.

It's probably not worth your time, even as a curiosity of early 1950s science fiction harking back in style to the early 1930s. The original unsold early-1950s first editions, by the way, are still readily available in their original dust jackets for $15.