This book is all hat and no cowboy. A Planet for Texans was written by H. Beam Piper and John J. McGuire as a science-fiction book that was probably intended to be some kind of statement about libertarian politics. What we get is a half-baked novelette with too much dialogue and a handful of science-fiction images. The end result is nothing memorable.
Stephen Silk is an ambassador for the Solar League, a United Nations type of organization that manages interplanetary politics at the end of the 22nd century. They send him to New Texas, a planet colonized by Texans after a series of wars that made them want to leave Terra and live according to their own rules on an alternate planet. The Solar League wants New Texas to join them but some of the planet’s inhabitants are against the idea for fear that they will not be allowed to continue with their lifestyle. The previous ambassador, Cumshaw (I couldn’t help thinking of his name being a misspelling of “cumshot” while reading this), was murdered and Silk needs to find out how and why.
The Texans colonized New Texas because it had herds of supercows, basically giant cattle that are no different from ordinary cows except for their enormous size. The ranch owners supply the entire universe and all its planets with supercow meat. There are a few other science-fiction details like space age guns and flying cars. More or less, New Texas does not appear to be a whole lot different from the real Texas and this story could have taken place on Earth without having to change much. There is one other difference though and that is the presence of the z’Srauff, a race of creatures that have achieved the same evolutionary level as homo sapiens only they descended from dogs instead of apes.
The strongest part of this book is its blending of elements from various genres. It has details that are not only from science-fiction but also westerns, detective fiction, mysteries, espionage, political thrillers, utopian literature, political ideology, and courtroom drama. But none of these elements are written out to their full potential. They hang out in the sidelines of the story and are more like window dressing then substantial parts of the book.
The characters are just as irrelevant. There are around ten different people that get introduced and most of them do nothing more than speak a couple of times. Some of them only speak once. Their main function in the story is to provide information about Cumshaw’s murder to Stephen Silk as he tries to solve the crime. The authors could have easily accomplished the same thing with two characters maximum. Why is Hoddy Ringo even in this book? He serves absolutely no purpose at all.
There isn’t much action to speak of. Aside from a flying car chase, a possible assassination plot that never gets full treatment, and a couple brief gun fights, most of the book is dialogue. The New Texans speak in a folksy idiom as they tell Silk about their freedom and love of guns. He questions them about the murder and then acts as a prosecuting attorney as the gang that shot Cumshaw are on trial. You mostly get the same story twice because the New Texans first explain the crime to Silk and then the whole story gets told again during the trial with mostly the same details. This takes up about half the story which is sad considering it is only 100 pages long. Authors that need to repeat themselves to such an extent to fill up pages don’t have much to say.
A Planet for Texans is a lean, skeletal, anemic piece of writing. It has the feel of an outline more than a story. The political ideology of New Texas is little more than shallow thoughts for simpletons but I won’t bother to dwell on that. If the authors filled in more details, added a subplot or two, given the characters more dimension, and thrown in a little more action, this could have been about half as good as Dune. But they didn’t and the result is juvenile, cartoonish, and rudimentary. It isn’t any more sophisticated than an episode of Scooby Doo. The authors put a half-assed effort into this book and could have done a lot better if they had actually made the effort.
Beam, H. Piper and McGuire, John J. A Planet for Texans. Ace Books Inc., New York: 1958.
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