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elskabee's review against another edition
adventurous
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Grabbing books off your parents' bookshelf that they thrifted back in the 80's is a risky endeavour. I had mixed success with this one as there's aspects I liked: the overall plot, not over explaining the sci-fi elements, some of the ideas and themes. Bu there was plenty I didn't like, mostly the dated stuff like having a singular female character, hypermasculinity, ableism, calling people 'primitive'. Also the writing was very flat and dry for the most part. It was very fast-paced and readable, but at the expense of properly developing characters and having emotional depth.
I think I cut this book a lot of slack due to how old it is, and I enjoyed it more when looking at it as a 60+ year old sci-fi book and the creativity involved in the overall concept even if I found the execution to be lacking for me personally. I don't feel the need to rate this because of my mixed feelings, but maybe a 2.5 or 3 overall.
I think I cut this book a lot of slack due to how old it is, and I enjoyed it more when looking at it as a 60+ year old sci-fi book and the creativity involved in the overall concept even if I found the execution to be lacking for me personally. I don't feel the need to rate this because of my mixed feelings, but maybe a 2.5 or 3 overall.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Ableism
sortabadass's review against another edition
adventurous
tense
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
2.0
theaceofpages's review against another edition
adventurous
tense
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
4.0
Imagine a planet at war with the people that settled there. Everything from the animals and plants to the weather seems to want to get rid of them. A world where despite training, most die young and civilisation is forced to live behind guarded walls. Welcome to Pyrrus. And the professional gambler Jason dinAlt is its first tourist. Of course he doesn't know what he's doing and of course everyone is scared of the danger that may cause.
Although short, this book accomplishes a lot. Despite being older SciFi, I don't think I have come across anything like it before. (Since I'm mentioning its older SciFi, it's surprisingly free of misogyny! Jason does make some questionable remarks but Pyrrus is surprisingly equal and we get a relatively strong female character in Meta. Maybe there are still some stereotypes woven in and maybe she asks too many questions but it's a lot for its time. Maybe not quite what we'd expect in modern times but hey, at least she is there for more than sex appeal). As a biologist I'm very interested in Pyrran life and how it evolved. I'd love the opportunity to study such a unique system. I'm planning on picking up the next book soon and hope we get to see some more of it. Maybe the characters and writing/events are a bit simplistic at times but it was a fun read!
Although short, this book accomplishes a lot. Despite being older SciFi, I don't think I have come across anything like it before. (Since I'm mentioning its older SciFi, it's surprisingly free of misogyny! Jason does make some questionable remarks but Pyrrus is surprisingly equal and we get a relatively strong female character in Meta. Maybe there are still some stereotypes woven in and maybe she asks too many questions but it's a lot for its time. Maybe not quite what we'd expect in modern times but hey, at least she is there for more than sex appeal). As a biologist I'm very interested in Pyrran life and how it evolved. I'd love the opportunity to study such a unique system. I'm planning on picking up the next book soon and hope we get to see some more of it. Maybe the characters and writing/events are a bit simplistic at times but it was a fun read!
Content Warnings
Moderate: Xenophobia, Animal death, Death of parent, Violence, Blood, Child death, Death, and Gun violence
Minor: Medical content and Misogyny
vzem's review against another edition
5.0
A fantastic sci-fi book that is fast-paced and full of adventure! I read it in my childhood and liked it because it had lots of exciting future devices, race of warrior-like people, monsters, etc. Now, reading it again as an adult, i can also appreciate the allegories within the narrative. These include the stiff-mindedness of people born to a closed culture, and by the opposition the advantage of a fresh perspective on things. Thus, this literary work is interesting from the standpoint of sci-fi and from exploring psychology and culture. Let me end with a quote from the book that resonated with me:
- "I don't know," she said. "I can't be sure. For the first time in my life I find myself with more than one answer to the same question."
- "Congratulations," he said. "It's a sign of growing up."
- "I don't know," she said. "I can't be sure. For the first time in my life I find myself with more than one answer to the same question."
- "Congratulations," he said. "It's a sign of growing up."
ogreart's review
4.0
Imagine a world where everything is trying to kill you. Welcome to Deathworld. The twists and turns of the plot really kept me going. I was never quite sure where Harrison was going, but I let go and let him lead me through it. More good old-fashioned old school sci-fi.
rheren's review against another edition
4.0
I tried this book out on a lark, because it sounded like an entertaining mindless book. I was very pleasantly surprised: sure it's old-fashioned, straightforward shoot-em-up at times, but it has a surprisingly interesting and thought-out storyline. Several genuinely interesting plot twists keep you wondering what will happen next, and I found it a very enjoyable book to read.
dantastic's review against another edition
3.0
When professional gambler Jason dinAlt is hired to run a stake up into the billions by some colonists, he is intrigued by tales of their world and opts to return to it. However, Pyrrus is the most hostile world in the universe, with every life form bent on the extermination of the colonists, even the plant life.
I read a few of Harry Harrison's Stainless Steel Rat books years ago and decided to give this one a try. It was free on the Kindle so the price was right.
Deathworld is a tale of man vs. environment. Is it better to tame the wilderness or live in harmony with it? That seems to be the theme of the novel.
Jason dinAlt is a gambling scoundrel, probably a literary descendant of C.L. Moore's Northwest Smith. Jason goes to Pyrrus out of curiosity and winds up leading a revolution of sorts.
Deathworld, aka Pyrrus, is a heavy gravity world where the plants and animals are trying to kill the colonists and have been for centuries, evolving at a frightening rate. The colonists continually try to exterminate the hostile life forms and keep on colonizing. Sound familiar?
The story kicks into high gear when it becomes apparent that the colonists aren't the only humans on the planet and the core theme is really driven home.
Even though there's an ecological message, it's not heavy handed and even people who are anti-environment will find it entertaining.
It's a pretty slim book and I don't want to blow all the surprises. It's a fun read and doesn't feel as dated to me as a lot of its contemporaries. Three out of five stars.
I read a few of Harry Harrison's Stainless Steel Rat books years ago and decided to give this one a try. It was free on the Kindle so the price was right.
Deathworld is a tale of man vs. environment. Is it better to tame the wilderness or live in harmony with it? That seems to be the theme of the novel.
Jason dinAlt is a gambling scoundrel, probably a literary descendant of C.L. Moore's Northwest Smith. Jason goes to Pyrrus out of curiosity and winds up leading a revolution of sorts.
Deathworld, aka Pyrrus, is a heavy gravity world where the plants and animals are trying to kill the colonists and have been for centuries, evolving at a frightening rate. The colonists continually try to exterminate the hostile life forms and keep on colonizing. Sound familiar?
The story kicks into high gear when it becomes apparent that the colonists aren't the only humans on the planet and the core theme is really driven home.
Even though there's an ecological message, it's not heavy handed and even people who are anti-environment will find it entertaining.
It's a pretty slim book and I don't want to blow all the surprises. It's a fun read and doesn't feel as dated to me as a lot of its contemporaries. Three out of five stars.
colorfulleo92's review against another edition
4.0
Yet another accidental reread but feel pretty much the same as last year. Might continue on with the series. But as I counted of many i started/continued this year (119 series in total), I'm not sure if I'm gonna rush it
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3.7 stars. An fun non to seriously taking sci-fi adventure on a planet where the creature and beasts tries to kill you. Enjoyed it but didn't love it hence the rating. Might continue on with the series though. Enjoyed the narration of B.J Harrison as well, which was one of the main reason why I looked this book up, glad I did
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3.7 stars. An fun non to seriously taking sci-fi adventure on a planet where the creature and beasts tries to kill you. Enjoyed it but didn't love it hence the rating. Might continue on with the series though. Enjoyed the narration of B.J Harrison as well, which was one of the main reason why I looked this book up, glad I did
kynan's review against another edition
4.0
TL;DR: Mr Harrison's first published work, and one of his best. Excellent 60's scifi for a younger or adult audience!
TL: I read this a long, long time ago and it's had a nominal 4-star rating since I first shelved it when I started using Goodreads. Surprisingly (given the beat-down that I recently gave [b:The Stainless Steel Rat|64394|The Stainless Steel Rat (Stainless Steel Rat, #4)|Harry Harrison|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1328073906l/64394._SY75_.jpg|824589] series), Deathworld held up really well and has retained its 4 stars!
Deathworld's premise is an interesting one, and one that we only reach circuitously. We start out with Jason dinAlt - professional and, of necessity, itinerant gambler. We meet dinAlt, carefully hiding behind a pseudonym as he arrives on the gambling planet Cassylia. dinAlt's preparations are interrupted when he is ferreted out by Kerk Pyrrus who makes a rather forceful proposition: that Jason gamble with Kerk's money, and win. He will be very, very well paid should he win, and possibly killed should he lose, but he doesn't have a great deal of choice. The plot spirals out quickly from this point and the pace rarely lets up from the very beginning. Much like the Stainless Steel Rat books, the action is both the leading hook (the tension literally starts to build from the very first sentence) and relentless with nary a chapter going past without some kind of relevant, but action laden scene.
Avoiding spoilers, Jason ends up paying a visit to the planet Pyrrus (from whence the imaginatively named Kerk hails). Pyrrus' claim to fame is that it's seriously rich in heavy metals, and seriously antagonistic to human survival. Not just in terms of planetary characteristics (like the 2G gravity and prodigiously extreme and changeable weather) but also in regard to the singularly vicious hatred that all forms of native Pyrran life (both animal and vegetable) display towards humans. Now, the planet itself is the source of my main gripe with this book, so let's get that out of the way first and then get on with listing all of the good stuff! My gripe is that, at some stage, humans decided to colonise Pyrrus with the aim of creating a stupendously wealthy mining colony. This turned out to be difficult as the planet subsequently waged a non-stop war against the colonists, over the course of nearly 300 years! 300. That's how long the Pyrrans have been attempting to live on the surface of Pyrrus, and mostly failing. I'm unconvinced that this status-quo would have withstood this kind of time-span. That said (and veering back into the "things that I like" category), Mr Harrison does his best to address this apparent unlikelihood by describing and expounding upon the single-mindedness of the Pyrrans and how their environment has necessarily molded them into this state, rendering them a little unlikely to spend time on flights of fancy that might result in someone going: you know what, this is ridiculous, time to leave!
The things I really like about this book is the fact that it's a really good story, along with being good, old-school, hard science fiction! There's space travel using chemical rockets and Jumps are made to achieve faster-than-light travel, but that's relegated to the background and that's fine! As was all the rage in the 60's there's an element of psionic-power exploration (something that would be echoed in the Stainless Steel Rats PSImen), but there's also a lot of background and exposition spent on explaining why things are the way they are. I mentioned this above, with regard to the socio-environmental interactions posited for the Pyrran's "doubling down" on maintaining their death grip on their chosen home, but there's also a fantastic scene early in the book where Kerk explains to Jason just how inhospitable Pyrrus is:
I truly love this little exposition because it performs the special magic that is science-fiction's crowning glory: it makes a connection to the real world, it inspires consideration not just on the content of the story, but on the potential way that the story reflects, projects or supposes about the real live universe. It challenges you to reconsider something so ordinary as water, with the simple statement of "Plenty of H2O, the most universal solvent you can find". The whole book is riddled with this kind of thing, and it's not just limited to physical sciences! The entirety of the book is dedicated to empathetic reaction, considering all sides of a conflict and, solutions to problems that don't just involve and equal and opposite reaction.
This is also not a satirical work, as much of the rest of Mr Harrison's books are, which is nice because it gives the main character some maneuvering room when it comes to being subversive, without being tounge-in-cheek satirical. dinAlt is not averse to weaponry (indeed, the opening chapter has him wielding a gun almost immediately) but similarly to Slippery Jim diGriz, Jason dinAlt has a strong moral desire to prevent needless death and this theme runs strongly through the plot. The book also has a limited female cast, although one of the lead characters is a woman, she is basically the only woman who makes it out of the background but she manages to be her own character and isn't just a love-interest for someone or a convenient monologue-support. Also, despite being written 60 years ago this book manages to maintain a credible line on future tech, with only a couple of jarring references to tape as a medium for things, especially ephemeral data like course plots.
Overall, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that Deathworld not only stands up to a modern re-read, I thoroughly (re-)enjoyed it and would happily continue to recommend it as a great gateway to science fiction for a younger audience.
TL: I read this a long, long time ago and it's had a nominal 4-star rating since I first shelved it when I started using Goodreads. Surprisingly (given the beat-down that I recently gave [b:The Stainless Steel Rat|64394|The Stainless Steel Rat (Stainless Steel Rat, #4)|Harry Harrison|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1328073906l/64394._SY75_.jpg|824589] series), Deathworld held up really well and has retained its 4 stars!
Deathworld's premise is an interesting one, and one that we only reach circuitously. We start out with Jason dinAlt - professional and, of necessity, itinerant gambler. We meet dinAlt, carefully hiding behind a pseudonym as he arrives on the gambling planet Cassylia. dinAlt's preparations are interrupted when he is ferreted out by Kerk Pyrrus who makes a rather forceful proposition: that Jason gamble with Kerk's money, and win. He will be very, very well paid should he win, and possibly killed should he lose, but he doesn't have a great deal of choice. The plot spirals out quickly from this point and the pace rarely lets up from the very beginning. Much like the Stainless Steel Rat books, the action is both the leading hook (the tension literally starts to build from the very first sentence) and relentless with nary a chapter going past without some kind of relevant, but action laden scene.
Avoiding spoilers, Jason ends up paying a visit to the planet Pyrrus (from whence the imaginatively named Kerk hails). Pyrrus' claim to fame is that it's seriously rich in heavy metals, and seriously antagonistic to human survival. Not just in terms of planetary characteristics (like the 2G gravity and prodigiously extreme and changeable weather) but also in regard to the singularly vicious hatred that all forms of native Pyrran life (both animal and vegetable) display towards humans. Now, the planet itself is the source of my main gripe with this book, so let's get that out of the way first and then get on with listing all of the good stuff! My gripe is that, at some stage, humans decided to colonise Pyrrus with the aim of creating a stupendously wealthy mining colony. This turned out to be difficult as the planet subsequently waged a non-stop war against the colonists, over the course of nearly 300 years! 300. That's how long the Pyrrans have been attempting to live on the surface of Pyrrus, and mostly failing. I'm unconvinced that this status-quo would have withstood this kind of time-span. That said (and veering back into the "things that I like" category), Mr Harrison does his best to address this apparent unlikelihood by describing and expounding upon the single-mindedness of the Pyrrans and how their environment has necessarily molded them into this state, rendering them a little unlikely to spend time on flights of fancy that might result in someone going: you know what, this is ridiculous, time to leave!
The things I really like about this book is the fact that it's a really good story, along with being good, old-school, hard science fiction! There's space travel using chemical rockets and Jumps are made to achieve faster-than-light travel, but that's relegated to the background and that's fine! As was all the rage in the 60's there's an element of psionic-power exploration (something that would be echoed in the Stainless Steel Rats PSImen), but there's also a lot of background and exposition spent on explaining why things are the way they are. I mentioned this above, with regard to the socio-environmental interactions posited for the Pyrran's "doubling down" on maintaining their death grip on their chosen home, but there's also a fantastic scene early in the book where Kerk explains to Jason just how inhospitable Pyrrus is:
"Mankind doesn't belong on Pyrrus - yet has been there for almost three hundred years now. The age expectancy of my people is sixteen years. Of course most adults live beyond that, but the high child mortality brings the average down."
"It is everything that a humanoid world should not be. The gravity is nearly twice Earth normal. The temperature can vary daily from arctic to tropic. The climate—well you have to experience it to believe it. Like nothing you've seen anywhere else in the galaxy."
"I'm frightened," Jason said dryly. "What do you have—methane or chlorine reactions? I've been down on planets like that—"
Kerk slammed his hand down hard on the table. The dishes bounced and the table legs creaked. "Laboratory reactions!" he growled. "They look great on a bench—but what happens when you have a world filled with those compounds? In an eye-wink of galactic time all the violence is locked up in nice, stable compounds. The atmosphere may be poisonous for an oxygen breather, but taken by itself it's as harmless as weak beer."
"There is only one setup that is pure poison as a planetary atmosphere. Plenty of H2O, the most universal solvent you can find, plus free oxygen to work on—"
"Water and oxygen!" Jason broke in. "You mean Earth—or a planet like Cassylia here? That's preposterous."
"Not at all. Because you were born in this kind of environment you accept it as right and natural. You take it for granted that metals corrode, coastlines change, and storms interfere with communication. These are normal occurrences on oxygen-water worlds. On Pyrrus these conditions are carried to the nth degree."
"The planet has an axial tilt of almost forty-two degrees, so there is a tremendous change in temperature from season to season. This is one of the prime causes of a constantly changing icecap. The weather generated by this is spectacular to say the least."
"If that's all," Jason said, "I don't see why—"
"That's not all—it's barely the beginning. The open seas perform the dual destructive function of supplying water vapor to keep the weather going, and building up gigantic tides. Pyrrus' two satellites, Samas and Bessos, combine at times to pull the oceans up into thirty meter tides. And until you've seen one of these tides lap over into an active volcano you've seen nothing."
"Heavy elements are what brought us to Pyrrus—and these same elements keep the planet at a volcanic boil. There have been at least thirteen super-novas in the immediate stellar neighborhood. Heavy elements can be found on most of their planets of course—as well as completely unbreathable atmospheres. Long-term mining and exploitation can't be done by anything but a self-sustaining colony. Which meant Pyrrus. Where the radioactive elements are locked in the planetary core, surrounded by a shell of lighter ones. While this allows for the atmosphere men need, it also provides unceasing volcanic activity as the molten plasma forces its way to the surface."
I truly love this little exposition because it performs the special magic that is science-fiction's crowning glory: it makes a connection to the real world, it inspires consideration not just on the content of the story, but on the potential way that the story reflects, projects or supposes about the real live universe. It challenges you to reconsider something so ordinary as water, with the simple statement of "Plenty of H2O, the most universal solvent you can find". The whole book is riddled with this kind of thing, and it's not just limited to physical sciences! The entirety of the book is dedicated to empathetic reaction, considering all sides of a conflict and, solutions to problems that don't just involve and equal and opposite reaction.
This is also not a satirical work, as much of the rest of Mr Harrison's books are, which is nice because it gives the main character some maneuvering room when it comes to being subversive, without being tounge-in-cheek satirical. dinAlt is not averse to weaponry (indeed, the opening chapter has him wielding a gun almost immediately) but similarly to Slippery Jim diGriz, Jason dinAlt has a strong moral desire to prevent needless death and this theme runs strongly through the plot. The book also has a limited female cast, although one of the lead characters is a woman, she is basically the only woman who makes it out of the background but she manages to be her own character and isn't just a love-interest for someone or a convenient monologue-support. Also, despite being written 60 years ago this book manages to maintain a credible line on future tech, with only a couple of jarring references to tape as a medium for things, especially ephemeral data like course plots.
Overall, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that Deathworld not only stands up to a modern re-read, I thoroughly (re-)enjoyed it and would happily continue to recommend it as a great gateway to science fiction for a younger audience.