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None but Man
"Out there...beyond the frontier beyond the last human settlement in the Pleiades, lay the territory of Moldaug: alien, menacing things from far, inhuman stars, who were gathering their forces for war. And it seemed that the people of the Old Worlds, in unreasonable and unreasoning fear, were preparing to sacrifice the colonies of the New Worlds in a cowardly attempt to avert that war...But not if frontiersman Cully When had anything to do with it! This exciting, action-filled adventure, set in a future century, is a beautifully detailed description of space-age guerrilla warfare and age-old human obstinacy. Its Gordon R. Dickson at his best!"
Original Publication: Doubleday, 1969
This Edition: DAW, May 1981
Cover Art: Richard Hescox
Format: Paperback
Notes:
Review:
None But Man by Gordon R. Dickson was a fairly decent read. It is essentially an story about how cultural misunderstandings can lead to war and how mutual understanding between different cultures must be deliberately sought to ensure generational peace. The main character, Cully When, is thrust into acting as a diplomat and rebel leader in a three-way misunderstanding between the Old Worlds, the New Frontier and the alien Moldaug species. Using rather traditional space opera form, Dickson paints a picture of an Old World Earth stuck in its ways, stodgy and uncompromising and riddled with fear of the unknown, a New Frontier filled with hardy individuals innately prepared to adjust and adapt to new challenges and an incomprehensible alien species which is unable to view the world through any other perspective other than their own, at least not without guidance. Cully When must bridge the gap.
From the limited amount we are given the Moldaug are an interesting species. They exist as a three-person individual, requiring all three to function. Those who don't exist in these small groups are are considered odd or mentally unstable. They also function under the social constraint of maintaining 'Respectability.' To a human, something is right or not right, to the Moldaug, actions are either respectable or unrespectable. This difference in how humans and Moldaug view the actions of each other has led the two cultures to the brink of war. But Cully sees a different outcome for the two peoples. Cully speaks to the leader of the Moldaug and he says, "Look around yourself, my Cousin Ruhn. The universe has shown the desirability. Myself has from the beginning striven for this to get across, to human and Moldaug alike, that two great races such as that of ye and we, powerful in armed might and of differing thoughts, cannot exist side by side in space without eventually either cooperating or destroying each other. And the key to cooperation is the responsibility upon both we humans and ye Moldaug alike to accept each other on the other's own terms, and judge them by their other standard."
This wasn't the greatest novel, but certainly not the worst. There's enough action and intrigue to keep the reader interested, but there are not layers and layers of depth. The characters are pretty shallow and for the majority of the story, Cully's actions seem meaningless. I would have liked to see Dickson develop the Moldaug and to have given them a more coherent culture. Detail was lacking, but it was entertaining.
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