n the spacefaring future, gambler Jason dinAlt makes a pleasant living using his psi powers to alter the odds at interstellar casinos. He is happy, if a little bored, with this lifestyle, until approached by a "grey-haired rock of man" named Kerk Pyrrus, who offers to finance dinAlt's next gambling spree if dinAlt uses his abilities to earn 3 billion credits in a single night.
Pyrrus is the leading citizen of a planet of the same name, whose human colonists have spent the last several centuries in pitched battle with the world's incredibly hostile ecosystem. The plants and animals of Pyrrus are constantly evolving newer and deadlier ways of killing people; their offensive capabilities change so quickly that any Pyrrans who leave the world on even a short trip need extensive retraining upon their return. The 3 billion credits Kerk needs from dinAlt are needed to fund the purchase of state-of-the-art weaponry.
DinAlt wins the money, all right, but his own take doesn't satisfy him. He demands to be taken to Pyrrus himself, so he can experience the untamed place firsthand. Once there, he discovers a human colony besieged by fauna so hostile that even children are trained to defend themselves at a moment's notice. The colonists are so inured to fear and death that their culture is based on nothing else; they have such tunnel vision over their circumstances that they haven't even noticed that they're losing the war, and that the population of Pyrrus has been steadily declining for years. Nor have they assigned any special significance to the fact that the "grubbers," a society of human beings who live outside the city walls, live in relative safety.
Despised by the Pyrrans, including the beautiful pilot Meta, for his lack of survival skills, dinAlt dedicates himself to stopping the carnage.
Space opera in its purest form
Harry Harrison is the venerable author of (among many other works) Bill the
Galactic Hero, Star Smashers of the Galaxy Rangers and The Stainless Steel Rat, which inhabited the borderland between space opera and satire. Deathworld, the first installment of a trilogy that also included Deathworld 2 and (let's see if you can guess this) Deathworld 3, was space opera in a much purer form. It has its resourceful hero, a sexy female whose assignment as official love interest is obvious from the moment of her first appearance, and a plot that hinges on scary monsters, hair's-breadth escapes and a solution that only the hero can see before it's too late.
As such, it's not exactly groundbreaking (except, possibly, for numbering its sequels with Arabic numerals a decade before anybody in Hollywood thought of doing it), but that's OK: Stories like this have always been the meat and potatoes of science fiction, and Deathworld is a fine, fast-moving journey from one cliffhanger to another, granted a fun '60s frisson by dinAlt's realization that continuing to blast the world's endless supply of monsters with bigger and better weaponry is precisely the opposite of what the Pyrrans need to do if the killing is ever to stop. Indeed, his biggest problem is not figuring out what's wrong with Pyrrus, but staying alive long enough to get the embittered and trigger-happy inhabitants to heed the advice they don't want to hear.
Deathworld hasn't aged as well as much of Harrison's other work; the characters (especially Meta) are simplistic constructs at best, and the story possesses about as much lasting resonance as a tuning fork. His mammoth short story collection 50 in 50 provides a much better look at his passion, skill and range. But that doesn't
lessen this novel's energy and narrative skill. For entrance-ramp science fiction, readers can do a lot worse.
