Half Past Human (SF Masterworks)

Few science fiction readers "of a certain age" have not read this dystopian novel. The peculiarly ecological vision of Bass found expression in only two books ("The Godwhale"  The Godwhale (SF Masterworks)  is the other), and echoed contemporary fictions of future societies—Orwell's "1984"  1984 (Signet Classics) , for example, and Huxley's "Brave New World"  Brave New World — in its view of human society as doomed to dark collapse under a weight of population and totalitarian control.In a far-future Earth, our distant descendants have been altered genetically to allow them to live in ultra-crowded hives. The genes that code for aggression when people are pressed too closely together turn out to be linked to the gene for five toes, so the Nebish people are four-toed and complacent. They fill their dark underground warrens in their billions, despite another genetic shift (and social mores) that limit reproduction.They are also cannibals. Unapproved children are allowed to exist until they begin to walk and talk. Then they are thrown into the "patty press," producing "flavors" for the Nebish who reports them. Other flavors come from rats and Nebish corpses tossed into the patty press. Aside from the taste of flesh, Nebish society is fed by the world-covering gardens of algae, and the lack of protein in their diet makes them weak and soft-boned, prone to die after only 25 to 30 years of life.Within the Nebish genome, though, the five-toed gene still thrives. Occasionally, children are born with all five toes, or with "the bud of a fifth toe." These children are allowed to mature, because the hive needs their mechanical skills, but they are not allowed to procreate.Without help, the Nebish are neuter. This gives Earth Society (the "big ES") control over reproduction, for in all except a few Nebish, hormone therapy is required to "polarize" into male or female. Tinker, an ingenious Nebish mechanic, has been authorized to produce a clone-type bud-child of himself, and is polarized male. He finds his attitudes about other Nebishes and life in the hive changing drastically; he fixates on the female, Mu Ren, who was assigned to carry his bud to term, and instead gets her pregnant with a hybrid child. Their child is born with five toes.To save their child, Tinker and Mu Ren must escape the hive, and join the savage wild humans who live on the surface and steal from the world garden. Once there, they encounter a host of curious characters: the ancient human Moon and his equally antique dog Dan, the spear-shaped robot Toothpick, a liberated mechanical harvester, the wild human shaman with his cybernetic Ball, Moses the escaped hive pipe-master, and Nebish Val the human-hunter.Bass gives us a chilling view of the future of humans under the foot of the Big ES, but also offers hope. 'Olga' is coming, and her purpose is to save the five-toed humans from the Big ES. But what shape will that salvation take?This is a classic novel that ought to be in every thinking reader's library, and studied along with Burgess and Orwell, Huxley and Harrison. If you've read it once, it's time to read it again, especially now that all these seminal novels are available on Kindle.

I read this book, and THE GOD WHALE, several times in the 70s & 80s. By the 90s, I found more books by and about women, and stopped. The author introducing this edition is correct: The book fails the Bechdel test (or any varient), completely. HOWEVER, I just finished watching the extended versions of the Lord of the Rings. Those are great movies. LoR was written bya man for men, and the almost total lack of female characters makes me nuts! I still enjoyed the movies.I still enjoyed this book, but I wouldn't recommend it to most SciFi fans. Maybe just to the lovers of classic SF or those who are bored to tears with the preponderant coming of age angst.

Bass had a unique take on man's dystopian future. The world in which trillions of people live below ground in unending, crowded cities and the entire surface of the Earth has been transformed into a vast farm. Most animals extinct. Everything else optimized for consumption.His creation of the "four-toed nebbishes", our evolutionary fate, is a stroke of literary genius.There are, of course, some few old-style humans remaining on the planet. They live on the surface and survive (barely) by stealing from the planet-spanning factory farms. But they are constantly in danger of extermination.The analog to Jewish mythology are obvious in the tale but entertaining and effective without the usual veil most authors drape over their message.Bass published one other novel, set in the same world of the four-toed nebbishes and fugitive humans: the superior GODWHALE which remains one of my favorite sf novels from that period.I gave this novel five stars because, while not quite as great a book as GODWHALE, it's still better than most sf novels from this period.

I love the SF Masterworks series, they have turned me on to all kinds of cool books that I would probably have never heard of otherwise.Half Past Human is one of those gems of science fiction which should never have been allowed to be forgotten in the first place. It paints a convincing and plausible picture of a dystopian future where overpopulation and automation has created the hive, an underground society where humans are bred for specific task only with permission. Humanity is almost lost under the crushing force of conformity and only a few ragged survivors known as buckeyes survive in the wilderness above ground where they are hunted like pest animals.If you enjoy quality science fiction with real thought and depth to it then you can't go past this book.

I didn't really get into the story until around halfway through. Once I got into it the story was good.

Glad to see this classic in e-book form. This and its sequel _The Godwhale_ are excellent examples of 70s science fiction and highly recommended for readers interested in the literary evolution of cyber- and bio-punk.

I have read this book multiple times. I keep losing my copy and when I saw it on Kindle, I knew I had to have it again. This is a tale of a dystopian future, where mankind's expansion is taken to the extreme. Definitely worth reading.

An interesting twist on the questions of global population. When your sources of animal protein are limited . . .

Ganz nette Adaption von „Die Maschine steht still“ von Foster. - 70 Jahre danach.Das Buch verpackt die Grundidee in nette Bilder und mehr Action. Etwas nervig die medizinischen Details, man merkt stark dass der Author Arzt ist? und dies gerne raushängen lässt.

good read

Yes very good story. well written and I liked the characters, i read the God whale in 1978, its still on my bookshelf, i have read it 6 times, Half past Human will stay with it.

You can’t throw a stone anywhere in SF without it hitting something belonging to H.G. Wells and here we have a stunted race living underground and a physically normal race on the surface. Yes, it’s the Eloi and the Morlocks again, though these Eloi are tough as old boots and the Morlocks are not wholly unsympathetic. There's also more than a nod to Forster's "The Machine Stops", too.Bass’s 1972 novel is an extrapolation on over-population (a popular theme in SF of the late sixties and early seventies) and takes the basic “Soylent Green” idea into a rather more scientifically plausible – and scary – place. Most of the world’s massive (three trillion) population lives in the Hive, a complex of underground tunnel cities. They’ve been genetically modified (they’re short, fat, weak, passive and short-lived) into a new human species, the Nebish, to make this endurable. Almost all animal species are extinct and the seas are sterile. The surface of the earth, at least below the tree-line, is devoted to mechanised agriculture but the comparatively small number of standard-issue homo sapiens, known as Buckeyes, also live on the surface, pretty much at Stone Age subsistence level. They’re seen by Big ES, the AI which runs the Hive, as a danger to the underground society, and the low-level conflict between the two worlds drives the novel’s plot. Bass gives us moderately sympathetic characters from each society, and ensures that the very differing miseries of each world are made clear, but while the introduction to the book by Ken MacLeod suggests Bass is even-handed in his views, to this reader it felt like his sympathies were very much with the Buckeyes and the handful of mutinous Nebish who desert the Hive for the surface. There is a resolution, of sorts (no spoilers), which is pure genre SF in that it’s simultaneously very inventive but also seems to slightly trivialise much of what’s gone before. It’s not quite deus ex machina, but it’s of that tendency. It’s also pure genre work in that the most engaging characters aren’t human at all. One’s an AI and the other is a dog with false teeth, which I must admit is a novelty to me in over 45 years of reading SF.The story is told in that slightly cynical voice that characterised a lot of American SF in this immediately post-New Wave period. I generally find that style engaging but found Bass’s authorial voice grating a lot of the time, largely because of the unremitting casual sexism that runs riot throughout. Female characters play no role in the book at all except as sex objects and mothers. Some of them aren’t even named. MacLeod points out, accurately, that in this it’s very of its time, but that doesn’t make it any easier to deal with. Franky, it's toe-curlingly embarrassing.The other problem with Bass is his medical background. His “real job” was working as a pathologist. Boy, does he let us know it. The prose is absolutely clotted with medical and physiological terminology. Some of this makes sense: it adds to the feel of body horror which characterises life both in the Hive and on the surface, and some of it’s needed as “rubber science” to explain the world of the Nebish. But Bass really overdoes it. Even his subsistence-level Neolithic surface dwellers use specialised medical technology and he also throws medical terms as adjectives into the narrative prose every chance he gets. His prose is notable for the paucity of memorable, vivid visual imagery – you are left with no idea of what this future world looks and feels like - and the over-use of physiological vocab makes this substantial flaw even more emphatic. A lot of the time I just felt Bass was trying to tell us “Look at how clever I am! I’m a DOCTOR, you know!”Ken MacLeod also feels Bass's novel suggests a lot about the issues facing the human race as the population rises, resources dwindle and advancing technologies offer solutions which come at a substantial ethical price. Well, I guess there’s some of that in there, but MacLeod seems to spot a lot more of it than I could, and I’m a philosophy graduate and therefore trained to extract every ounce of potential meaning from a shopping list, let alone a science fiction novel.Despite all that, the (male) characters are just about engaging enough, and the (episodic) narrative pacey enough, to make it a reasonably entertaining read, if - justifiably - gross at times. And there is food for thought, though it’s more of a mid-morning snack than the banquet MacLeod suggests. Overall, it’s fairly typical SF, in that it inextricably couples the brilliant and the asinine, but then that is part of the genre’s queasy charm. I enjoyed it enough to decide to read the related semi-sequel, "The Godwhale", but it has to be said that while much SF is flawed, "Half Past Human" doesn’t so much wear its flaws on its sleeve as have 'em tattooed on its brow while shouting about them through a megaphone.

What a crazy book. So here's the plot: mankind has evolved into 4-toed underground dwellers (no, not morlocks), unable to do anything (eat, reproduce, have sex) without beaurocratic sanction. Everyone lives in cavernous hives, stupefied by conditioning, breeding & narcotics into unthinking drones. The surface has been left to the few thousand or so people who have rejected this way of life and have returned to more primitive hunter/gatherer communities. So far so good, all sounds very interesting, and indeed life in the hive is when the book is most interesting, a nightmarish Orwellian vision. Trouble is its very difficult to care about any of this. Characters come and go, never staying long enough for us to really form an attachment to them. So we have a large cast but not much emotional involvement. The author also uses a whole heap of medical terminology at every opportunity, and has his characters use it too, until you get the impression that everyone except you has spent 5 years at medical school., even the hunter gatherers. Also, female characters, whats going on here? Male characters are reasonably well drawn and diverse, but the female ones are basically slaves to their hormones, becoming literally sex crazed beasts once a month, jumping on any male they can find. Nice fantasy for the author, and i'm sure i once read something similar in an old copy of Playboy, but it doesn't work so well here, within a Masterworks of SCi-Fi series. The book also covers a time span of several decades, so was clearly aiming for epic Frank Herbert/Tolkein territory. Decades are breezed through towards the end, and unfortunately, for all of these reasons, it doesnt really work.