arth has been conquered by aliens so huge that people have the status of insects. The lone remnants of humanity now subsist as vermin between the walls of alien homes, stealing food, evading traps, avoiding the poisons and repellents the aliens use to combat them. Their proud history as rulers of Earth has been passed down from one generation to another, and has taken on the importance of a religion.
Eric the Only is a young man about to engage in his rite of passage into adulthood: He must make his first theft. He learns along the way that his uncle has made a surreptitious alliance with another tribe, which meets him beneath some alien furniture to hand him an alien artifact certain to make his reputation as a thief. He takes the item in question back to his people, only to discover that he has been betrayed, and that he is now a man without a home among a people without a home.
On his own, Eric hooks up with representatives of several other tribes, including those he knows only as the Outsiders. The not-very-well-organized group has vague ambitions of using the aliens' own science against the invaders. But when they're captured, and imprisoned in a vast laboratory, the question becomes whether mankind's dispossession is really a handicap at all—or the key to a greater destiny.
A comic novel of alien invasion
Some science fiction books are classics because you read them when you were 12 years old, which allowed them to catch hold of your imagination in a way that few stories have since.
Sometimes you reread those books as an adult, and they're every bit as special as you remember. Sometimes, they're just plain embarrassing.
And sometimes you can't figure out what to think.
William Tenn is a venerable and respected name in the field. He's written many shorter works of fiction strong enough to cement his reputation. His only novel, Of Men and Monsters, is also recalled with fondness, and it's easy to see the major reasons, from the masterful opening sentence ("Mankind consisted of 128 people.") to its imaginative and often witty portrait of humanity living like insects in the walls and along the floorboards of gigantic alien monsters who no doubt see themselves as comfortable suburbanites beset by a persistent roach problem. Tenn has a lot of fun with the inherent comic potential of such a universe, with one of the best jokes involving the age-old debate that rages between his humans over why one of the two distinct kinds of giant aliens always stamps them dead, while the others so often run shrieking. (Tenn's heroes never figure out the answer, and Tenn never provides us with one, but a little healthy sexism will clue you in just fine.)
In the minus column, there's the characterization, which is both simple and schematic. Nobody's interesting, not even the hero, and some of the people exist only to deliver long expository speeches on behalf of the author. The most problematic section in all of this is Chapter 19, which occurs shortly after the monsters, who seek to breed humans for lab specimens, dump our young hero into a cage already occupied by a brave and resourceful young lady named Rachel. Aware that they will be separated, and probably killed, if the monsters don't get what they want, Eric and Rachel make a very rational, and utterly dispassionate, decision to become life-mates as the best way of staying alive long enough to escape.
The problem, in this young-adult novel with no real onstage sex, is that their businesslike "mating" is described in terms so campy, so preadolescent, that it's hard to know whether Tenn was writing badly or being deliberately funny. For instance, after a chaste exchange of vows, Eric marvels: "It was a pretty fast mating. One of the fastest I ever heard about." The chapter then closes as Eric leans toward her, his whole body tense, and declares, "I want to know all there is to know about protoplasm." And so on. There's a lot of this. It's laugh-out-loud funny ... but in a book where even the best dialogue is so stiff, did Tenn really want us to laugh?
