Customer Reviews

Virgin Planet

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300 years ago, a spaceship crash-landed on a moon of a gas-giant in a double-star system, stranding its passengers and crew--500 women, most of them bound to new settlements on the frontier planets. One of them, a bioscientist, succeeded in inventing a parthenogenesis machine so that they could, in effect, clone themselves and maintain a functioning society until "the Men come to claim us." But in three centuries the women of Atlantis have completely forgotten what a Man really is. And so, when dilettante explorer Davis Bertram (in his society the surname comes first) blunders onto their world, they not unexpectedly take him for "a Monster"--one of the alien races almost as legendary as Men.

Thus begins a fantastic and fascinating odyssey by Davis and three of the women of Freetoon--Barbara and Valeria Whitley, cousins in the local armed forces, and Elinor Dyckman, a former lover of the town's chief--across half the breadth of Atlantis, as Davis tries to convince the women that Men really *do* sweat and bleed and feel fear, and they all seek to elude the Doctors from the crashed Ship, who see Davis's advent as signalling the end of their power over the Atlantean society. Anderson's premise is perhaps a bit incredible, but he succeeds in portraying a believable society growing from it, and--being a "hard" sf writer at heart--even includes a terminal Note explaining the physics of Atlantis and its system. Originally written in 1970, and thus just prefiguring the rise of Women's Liberation, it's an intriguing look at a unique human society with plenty of action, humor, and suspense to keep things humming.