I picked up the book Half Past Human for free a few weeks ago at a bookstore. That’s right; they were giving the book away. I couldn’t resist the tagline on the front “Awakening to manhood is deadly when your whole world is watching,” or the back cover which read:

Get Yourself a Female! It was a direct order. Tinker was a Good Citizen of the hive, he had no choice. The time had come to give up his neuter status and become polarized. The Big Earth Society wanted Tinker to mate. But no one had prepared Tinker for sexual activation, nor for a woman like Mu Ren. From that moment on, Tinker was no longer a Good Citizen of the hive. Suddenly Tinker knew he wanted more. He wanted out. Tinker had become a man…

Wow. This book promised to be the cheesiest book ever. I couldn’t wait to get it home and start reading.

Half Past Human by T.J. Bass, c. 1971

The year is 2349. The Earth’s citizens have evolved into a species with four toes called the Nebish. Over three trillion Nebish live underground in crowded shaft cities, subsisting on tasteless protein bars and the occasional flavored food. Few Nebish will risk going aboveground to be baked alive by the sun’s rays. The Hunters, armed with protective gear and drugged into a blood-thirsty frenzy, are the only ones who travel Outside to hunt the five-toeds and to protect the crops tended by machines.

Buckeyes, coweyes, and jungle bunnies are the hunted. This species has five toes on each foot and ekes out an existence on the Earth’s surface. These aborigines live primitively and use stone tools to avoid the metal detectors of the Huntercraft. There are only one million five-toeds left on Earth, and their numbers are slowly being depleted by the Hunters who bring their lifeless bodies back to the shaft cities as trophies.

To control the population and to suppress the bad five-toed gene, the Nebish are not allowed to mate without authorization. When Tinker, a mechanic who maintains the Huntercraft, and his wife have a son with five toes, they decide to flee Outside rather than face the anguish of losing their son to the garbage chute. Once Outside, they join a band of buckeyes who are determined to flee from the Hunters and to journey to the paradise promised by Olga, a mysterious deity. Unbeknownst to Tinker and the members of his new tribe, buckeyes around the world and even some Nebishes are rallying as if an unseen force is guiding their actions…

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So… my take on this book is that it is not nearly as terrible as I first thought it would be. It was actually fairly engaging… once I got past the first 100 pages or so. As noted in this review in the SF Signal, the book’s writing style is extremely difficult to follow. Between the obscure medical terminology (T.J. Bass is a physician) and the terms invented by Bass to describe aspects of life in the future, I had a difficult time following the narrative in the beginning. Even more frustrating is Bass’s penchant for frequently switching perspectives between characters and even inanimate objects without adequate warning - especially with the introduction of new characters. I kept finding myself re-reading pages, trying to determine who was doing what.

However, once I got into the rhythm of the book, I was interested enough in the plot to keep reading. The book raises some intriguing themes - population control, ecology, intervention of technology in the gene pool, artificial intelligence, and utopian/dystopian societies to name a few. I am interested enough that I will probably read the book’s sequel The Godwhale. As attested to by this blog post and this review on the Strange Words web site, Half Past Human certainly has a rabid fan base, and the book even was nominated for the Nebula Award in 1971.

So, go figure. Although I still think that no book should take 100 pages to get into, in this case I’m not sorry that I read it. I guess in this case the lesson is “don’t judge a book by its cover,” as the cover really has nothing to do with the actual book. But the cover does take the cake for being one of the cheesiest covers of all time…

Tags Half Past Human . T. J. Bass