Customer Reviews

Half Past Human

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Half-past human is a wild futuristic novel about overpopulation and its impact on the human race. It brings us to a time when technology has advanced to a bio-techno-automated society ran by the dictates of an artificial-intelligence led council. Reproduction is controlled by the council. Man lives in hives,while all available land is cultivated by vast agro auto-
matons into vast vegtable gardens. It is into these forbidden gardens that genetic throwbacks with the original non hybredized blood strain, venture to live freely,tribally and with Nature in a way the hive people are physically unable to. They are hunted by the hive and find a way to escape the society that desires their destruction. The book explore different facets of life,inside and outside of the hive. I have read this book over and over and I never cease to be thrilled by this awe-raising pshyche-eco futuristic scifi thriller.

This will be short and sweet, just like the book. I first read this when it was new, and a few times since then. Although it has been several years, I can still recall the feel and the tone, and I can recommend it to SF and Fantasy fans, and anyone who wants a short visit to a creative and vivid world. The earth is now populated by 4-toed humans with rosewater for blood. These hive-dwellers live beneath the surface, which is dedicated to agriculture. Here and there the dreade 5-toed gene reappears, producing a stronger and more strong-willed specimen. The resulting troublemaker is the star of the story. Choose this one for the language and the off-kilter use of songs and verse. It's an easy read, and you might retain a bit of it for awhile.

Half Past Human and The Godwhale are the sum total of Thomas J. Bassler's SF output, but even after 20 years, they remain two brilliant points of light, pointing to what should have been a long and brilliant career. I would love to see him come back and take up fiction again- these books rival Cordwainer Smith and Jack Vance in the richness of the world they create. If you read this book years ago, pick it up and read it again. The Nebbishes and their flavored calories are images that will stay with you for a lifetime.

T.J. Bass' Half Past Human is a flawed yet occasionally intriguing fix-up novel which was nominated for the 1971 Nebula Award. I found that the atrocious prose overshadowed all the work's positives and made it a chore to read. Bass is a practicing doctor and thus apparently finds it fun to inundate his narrative with medical terminology.

Some particularly atrocious examples:

"Willie froze. Little warning reflexes were activated deep in his basal ganglia -- thoracolumbar autonomics flared" (158).

"Myotonia and vasocongestion of the breasts -- she was well into the excitement phase" (153).

"She had an ovum waiting in her tense follicle and had selected young Moses to fertilize it. Her estrogen flushed body respoded to the presence of Moses -- a sexually mature male. Homologous erectile tissue in her nasal septum swelled... Capillary beads became engorged producing a maculopapular rash over her trunk" (123).

If this technique was applied in a more limited fashion it *might* have added to the general feel of the work -- however, simply put, it is a frustrating distraction and a failed attempt at originality.

Brief Plot Summary

Future Earth has been transformed for the sole purpose of feeding a massive population. Science has created a four-toed docile/"programmable"/and communal Nebish (still a "human" -- or perhaps, a humanoid). Trillions of Nebishes live in gigantic shaft cities with the surrounding farmable countryside (the Garden) operated by programmable mecks. The shaft cities recycle all human waste, the dead humans, etc and are crowded and overpopulated. Depending on the usefulness of various citizens the shaft cities supply the Molecular Reward and calorie allotments. The Nebishes are "polarized" at various points in their lives when they need to take on a specific gender.

Not all humans are Nebishes. The five-toed varieties, called buckeyes, wander the surrounding fields. The buckeyes are not all that superior to the Nebishes for they resort to cannibalism etc and live in primitive huts. Drugged Nebish hunters continuously prey on the buckeyes and take back their bodies as trophies.

The novel follows a group of characters both buckeye and Nebish. Tinker, a Nebish, is polarized at the order of the government. After his wife gives birth to an illegal child he escapes with his family to a buckeye village. Moon (a buckeye) and his dog Dan wander the countryside with Toothpick, an unusual mechanical being with a mysterious purpose. Various other characters wander in an out at will. None are particularly easy to emphasize with and when we finally do, Tinker for example, they don't appear again for another hundred pages.

There's a mysterious cult of Olga...

Unusual pied piper mechanical beings...

Final Thoughts

Half Past Human is plagued with the primary flaws of a fix-up novel -- poor pacing. The plot moves in no particular direction for the first 130 pages and then speeds up exponentially at the point where another novella was stitched in.

However, despite the atrocious prose and poor pacing Half Past Human is not completely without merit. I found Bass' unusual approach to mechanical beings particularly intriguing. I also found his refusal to make the external buckeye society a utopian society -- they are squalid and eat the dead Nebish hunters -- an interesting choice.

But, my overall impression is a negative one. If you're in the mood for mucking through a biology textbook lexicon in order to get at one of two ideas then go ahead...

For all its dark depiction of a future crammed with hundreds of billions of Nebbishes and a few humans, I was moved most by what it said of the here and now. Those of us who can still think find ourselves surrounded by mindless sub-units of the State and wonder how bad it will get. This is one vision of that. It tells a similar story to The Matrix in a completely different way.

I began reading this and quickly gave it up; so fair warning, anything I say below may be unfair, as it's based on 70-odd pages at the beginning and end of the book.

This book is written as a protest against the hyper-organization and hyper-regulation of "civilization"; at the end, one character says fervently that even if it was necessary for survival, civilization would be too high a price to pay. The entire Earth has been turned into an underground Hive-society, run by "the Big ES", which keeps its three-toed citizens' soft, sun-sensitive bodies sheltered, in return dictating their activities, thoughts, and reproduction; the surface is all gardens, inhabited by robots and by five-toed "evolutionary throwbacks" (plenty of misunderstood genetics in this story) who live a "neolithic" life and are bloodily hunted. The one possible originality of this story, which has otherwise been done over and over by science fiction writers of the 50s, 60s, and 70s, is firstly the prominence given to pregnancy and birth (though not well-written), and secondly the fact that it is stated that one way the Big ES keeps Hive people tame is for them to be neuter, and they are not really aware of their surroundings until they are made reproductively active by being "polarized" with hormones, which makes them more enterprising (at least the males).

The book is written in short sentences, with few embellishments except for throwing in 2-dollar words the author doesn't always use correctly. It cuts quickly from scene to scene, switching between characters; but actually there aren't characters so much as what I might call "Representative Social Components" (which sounds like Hive-speak). This goes double for any females, who are little more than sexual attractants and wombs. All in all, the concept is so-so, the plot is passable, and the writing is pretty ham-handed.

Half Past Human is an intriguing tale of a dark future of overpopulation. The population of the earth stands in the trillions, with most people living underground in gigantic hive cities. The people are genetically engineered to be small, docile and weak, dependant on their cities and immune to the psychological effects of overcrowding. The entire surface of the earth is given over to food production, shortening the food chain to its barest minimum. A few "wild" humans live on the surface, foraging for food in the gardens and hunted as vermin.

In the face of all this, the citizens of the hive cities manage to retain some spark of that which makes them human.

This is a book well worth the trouble to find.

Wonderfully weird and poetic little novel -- I read it when I was thirteen and never forgot it. Skewed more towards the satirical than hard science, it's a classic dystopian story in the style of George Lucas's THX 1138. I have to agree with the other reviewer who lamented T.J. Bass's disappointingly limited output. I've always wondered what happened to the author after he published his two sci-fi classics.

I was in high school when I read T J Bass' two brilliant sci-fi novels (Half Past Human and The Godwhale). At the time I was overwhelmed with the futuristic ride, bio-medical buzzwords, and Bass' overall concept of human destiny, and the two books lived on my shelf for decades. This year I re-read Half Past Human and was pleased to find how well he holds up. Bass is not a virtuoso writer, that is true, but he has a clear and consistent style: he sees everything from a perspective of bio-engineering. He was remarkably prescient for 1971. I also love the biblical metaphors that come to dominate the last chapters. The novel finishes as strong as it starts, which can be said for few sci-fi paperbacks.

This is asolutely, no hesitation, my favorite book of all time. I picked it up by accident in High School and fell in love with it immediately. As I aged and learned more about science and life I got something new from this book every time I read it. I have now read it over thirty times and have worn out three copies (I now own my fourth). Even though I know the outcome I have learned from it every time. I recommend this book highly BUT it is not for the squeamish because the only meat on Earth is, guess what, human.