A Planet Called Treason
Plot summary[edit] The premise of this novel is the banishment to the seemingly metal-poor planet Treason of a group of people who attempted to create rule by an intellectual elite. The novel centers on the descendants of these anti-democratic thinkers who remain imprisoned on the planet. Through the ages, these descendants have formed nations which warred and allied with one another to gain advantages over their rivals in the race to build a starship. Due to the metal-deficiency on Treason, nations are forced to obtain it through a system of barter using teleportation devices known as Ambassadors. The protagonist of the book is Lanik Mueller, heir apparent to the Mueller family kingdom. The Muellers, through generations of eugenics, have the ability to heal at an accelerated speed and regrow body parts naturally. The dark side to the Mueller nation is that, in order to obtain iron and other metals, they trade organs and body parts, which are harvested from radical regeneratives ("rads"). Radical regeneratives are people whose bodies can't distinguish between health and injury, and so grow extra appendages as well as organs of the opposite sex; although this is a normal phase for most Muellers at the age of puberty, the bodies of radical regeneratives never outgrow it.
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4mentions
4people
2012–2026years
50% recommend25% neutral25% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- His work is surely uneven but he wrote some awesome things and that makes him great for me. I don't expect people I admire to consistently produce masterpieces. I'm greatful even if they managed to produced only one.
I also liked his A Planet Called Treason
- I love Ender's Game but my opinion of it has dropped over the years. His A Planet called Treason however affected me pretty deeply, and I still read it from time to time.
- Have you ever read "Travel by Wire!"? It was the first story that Arthur C. Clarke published. It's... youthful in its writing.
Or how about Pebble in the Sky?
> Boucher and McComas were disappointed by the novel, saying that despite Asimov's good ideas, "his heavy treatment and routine plot are disappointing.
Try to find a copy of The Big U by Neal Stephenson. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Big_U ("When Stephenson's Snow Crash was published in 1992, the book that became a best-seller and vaulted him to fame, The Big U was out of print and Stephenson was content to leave it that way. When original editions began selling on eBay for hundreds of dollars, he relented and allowed The Big U to be republished, saying that the only thing worse than people reading the book was paying that much to read it.")
Or Sundiver being a much weaker book than the rest of the Uplift series.
Or A Planet Called Treason by Orson Scott Card (which was even worse when I reread it as an adult).
Old Man's War was Scalzi's first "real" story... one that he had in the back of his mind to write in his college years.
He has matured as a writer since then.
- It's nice of you to point out that, coincidentally, the people you disagree with are the ones behaving ostentatiously on this thread.
Here, let me chime in with another piece of Card's writing advice, as convincingly retold by Jo Walton:
"My C shelves begin, controversially, with Orson Scott Card, who was one of my favourite authors for a long time but whom I can no longer read. I started reading him with Hot Sleep and A Planet Called Treason in the early 80s, and I stopped in 1997, so I have read absolutely everything up to then and nothing since. I stopped reading him because he said in his book on how to write that the best way to get readers engaged was to have appealing innocent characters and torture them, and after that I kept seeing that he was doing that and it kept jerking me out of the story."
