The Goblin Reservation

I’m giving this two stars as opposed to one because it didn’t feel torturous to read it, I got through it, it was entertaining enough, the sentences were grammatical, and it was better than some fanfiction I’ve read. That said, a friend of mine was just teasing me for never giving anything one star, so maybe I’m generous with the stars and my second one should be taken with a grain of salt. I think the reason I don’t give one star reviews is because I don’t finish books I hate and don’t feel qualified to review things I haven’t finished.

Anyway, the writing style: No finesse. It seemed like one of those rough drafts where the author just wants to get all the action, dialogue, and exposition down on the page before going back later to bring it to life. The writing is simplistic enough that I think if it was published now (as opposed to 1968) it would have been classified as YA*. There weren’t any typos or grammatical problems, but there were some odd unnecessary repetitions. For example, in one scene Maxwell drinks some moonshine, chokes on it, and then wishes his friend made better moonshine (or something to that effect, I don’t feel like searching through to find the line). Anyway, about a page later he again chokes on the moonshine and again wishes his friend made better moonshine. Choking on the drink twice in one scene is fine- I’ve certainly done that in real life. But the wishing the moonshine was better could have gone without saying the second time. There was so much potential for exploring the setting- both future earth and the crystal planet, but it never came to life, which is a shame because a lot of the ideas for the setting were pretty cool.

The characters were total cardboard. I stopped reading the book for a couple weeks just because I was moving to a different city and needed to finish the library books I had checked out in the first city. Anyway, it’s not unusual for me to get part way through a book and then have to return it to the library and then to pick it up from where I left off a couple months later when it comes in as a hold. I know that I don’t generally have trouble remembering what’s going on. But with this book, I never did straighten out who all the academic dudes were. Of course I could remember the main character and the caveman and the ghost and the woman who owns a sabertooth tiger. But there are three or four male characters who work at the university who have very different functions in the plot but forgettable names and no personalities. I could not keep them straight. It really irritated me that the main character kept using threats and violence in situations when diplomacy would have been more appropriate, but I notice that sort of behavior a lot from men in older media, so maybe it’s a function of the time period in which the book was written The treatment of female characters was also irritating. One, Nancy, was the stereotypical socialite with a “frothy brain” who just likes throwing parties. The other, Carol, is the obligatory het love interest (there is no chemistry between her and the male character she’s intended for) whose only interesting feature is that she has a saber tooth tiger as a pet. She’s a really bad pet owner too- always letting the sabertooth run around off leash, getting into trouble. At one point in the story, she’s at one of Nancy’s parties and talks about how she feels like she’s only invited because her pet makes a good conversation piece. Well, she’s only in this book because of her pet and because there just had to be a woman around for Maxwell to fixate on so we’re reassured he’s straight or something.

Another thing that bothered me a lot about this book is themes. One of the library books I read in the middle of reading this book was about philosophy in science fiction. Since Clifford D Simak is supposed to be a grand master of science fiction, I expected his writing to be at least somewhat representative of science fiction in terms of philosophy, but he really didn’t explore his themes very well. When I mentioned to my boyfriend that I was reading a book called “The Goblin Reservation” he said he expected it to have the same plot and message as Avatar. Well, it’s definitely not that. I’m going to write this without spoilers and put vague spoilers in footnotes. There’s some mention of the theme of colonialism, but the investigation of that starts and ends with a banshee (which was male even though they’re traditionally female- is the author going out of his way to minimize female representation?) saying something against humans and Maxwell dismissing what he says as bitterness. The alien colonization situation seems different enough from real life colonialism that perhaps there’s just no way it could be considered analogous. It’s not very fleshed out though. There’s also a part where a particular alien life form says something about how humans are intolerant towards his kind and Maxwell goes off on this rant about how intolerance isn’t a bad thing or whatever. There are lots of ways in which human reactions to this particular life form seem very similar to anti-black racism, particularly in the last few chapters, but in the world of the story it’s treated as justified. It’s hard to say if this is intentional or not. On one hand, the book was written when the Civil Rights Movement was current, so it’s hard to believe that the author wasn’t aware of the possible analogies. On the other hand, these life forms are literally colonies of insects, so maybe that’s supposed to be different enough from any group of humans to break the analogy. Extra spoilery detail as footnote **. Anyway, if you just read to follow an exciting plot, this probably won’t bother you. But if you do like analyzing your reading, it will likely be irritating.

Also, I was very disappointed by how little information we got on what sort of knowledge the crystal planet was offering. Part of why I chose to get this book was because I had a compelling dream a while back about finding a profound wealth of alien knowledge and the premise of this book looked like it would be similar to that. But ultimately in this book the wealth of knowledge wasn’t at all explored and was just treated as this object that everyone wants. I get that it would be difficult for an author to come up with any piece of knowledge that would seem profound enough. I get that it’s hard to investigate the knowledge in a satisfying way without directly stating facts that are considered part of the knowledge. It just seemed that the author could have done at least a bit better with handling these issues.

* Pretty sure YA wasn’t as much of a genre in the 60s, although I could be wrong since that was decades before I existed. Anyway, there’s no graphic violence or sex scenes in this, I don’t remember about swearing, so if you’re a parent who really cares what your teen reads, this is perfectly appropriate aside from not being well written. Don’t take this as an endorsement of monitoring teen reading- I think teens should be able to read whatever they want so they can exercise the critical thinking skills they’re developing. But if you’re inclined to care about that sort of thing…

** SPOILERY FOOTNOTE: at the end they seem to imply that pets and creatures created to be pets are more important than creatures created to be slaves/servants. Don’t get me wrong, I love pets, but wtf?