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ommodities trader Marcus Walker, who makes much of his success dealing in cocoa futures, is camping out alone on the shores of Cawley Lake in the Sierra Nevada mountains. He has had a fine rest and looks forward to ending his restful vacation and returning to his comfortable existence in Chicago.
Returning from a local tavern, where his evening buying drinks for a local hottie was cut short by the arrival of the lady's threatening brother, he finds an even greater menace awaiting him: several representatives of an alien race known as the Vilenjji, who knock him out before he can escape.
Walker awakes in his tent, by the shores of the same lake, with every detail of his prior environment reproduced in full, down to the very last pebble. But he's not on Earth anymore. It's a cell, designed to keep him comfortable in transport. The Vilenjji plan to take him, and a number of other abducted sentients from various inhabited worlds, to a central marketplace where they will be sold as curiosities for the amusement of decadent alien collectors.
Walker is the only human being aboard, but not the only Earthling. He is soon introduced to the inhabitant of a cell reproducing a filthy Chicago alley: a 40-pound wire-haired mutt whose intelligence and language skills the Vilenjji have enhanced in order to render him a more valuable commodity. The dog, which can now speak, and which has a stray dog's cynical worldview, has no name until Walker suggests George.
Encountering other prisoners, including the conceited, squidlike Sque and the giant, threatening Braouk, Walker is advised to accept his fate. After all, even if he manages to escape his cell and overpower the Vilenjji, there's no place to flee to but the vastness of space. But he vows to make allies, and make his way to freedom.
Science-fiction fast food
In October 1936, the pulp magazine Amazing Stories published a novelette called "The Human Pets of Mars," by Leslie Stone. It was a terrible story, all in all, marred by juvenile prose, a shortage of logic and enough outright racism (toward its black characters) to make most modern-day readers incredulous. Still, the premise, that of human beings rendered property for the amusement of an indulgent alien race, was compelling: so much so, in fact, that the tale was eventually reprinted by (an abashed) Isaac Asimov, in Beyond the Golden Age, his mid-'70s retrospective of the stories that influenced him most as a youth.
Since then, abduction by aliens has become such an integral part of our national folklore that the concept has become hackneyed as science fiction. Any novel featuring that as its central conceit (as opposed to jump-off point) feels not visionary but retro. Alan Dean Foster's Lost and Found is no exception. Only Foster's far more professional prose, his greater wit and a few mildly off-color jokes denoting the somewhat more liberal publishing standards of our time stand between this book and one of the same general premise that could have been published 50 years ago—or, as Stone's tale demonstrates, 70. Anybody who reads science fiction to be bowled over by great feats of imagination won't find much of value here.
That said, the book is not without its merits. The aliens encountered by Walker are not human-analogues in rubber-forehead drag: Their languages are translated, for their benefit and for the reader's, but that doesn't make them any less strange or unpleasant as forced company. Walker has more in common with the talking dog, George, than he does with any of the others in the Vilenjji menagerie; nobody has much use for anybody else, which renders their alliance all the more remarkable. The dialogue is sometimes amusing, and sometimes heartfelt. The prose is sometimes too cute but just as often exactly as cute as it needs to be. The escape, when it occurs, may be fueled in large part by the arrival of a deus ex machina rescuer, but the facile nature of that plot twist is redeemed by subsequent developments establishing that getting away from the bad guys doesn't really change Walker's plight all that much: He still has no way of providing the location of Earth to anybody willing to take him there.
All of which emerges as mixed praise at best. Sorry. It's not a bad book, but not an outstanding one either. It's science-fiction fast food.
Lost and Found is the first book of the "Taken" trilogy, establishing Walker and his bickering companions as lost travelers who will spend the next two volumes looking for home. My own curiosity about their further adventures is minimal, but your mileage may vary. — Adam-Troy
Also in this issue: ßehemoth: ß-Max, by Peter Watts
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