James Nicoll Reviews

H. M. Hoover’s 1977 The Delikon is a stand-alone young adult science fiction novel.

Humanity ventured to the stars in quest of what they assumed to be their great destiny. The alien Delikon, having taken humanity’s measure, swiftly conquered the short-lived upstarts¹. As humans were clearly incapable of moderating their own behavior, the Delikon constructed a capital city on Earth, Kalidor, from which they set about shaping humans to conform to civilized standards.

A very long time later, the rigid caste system appears eternal.

The Delikon are only vaguely humanoid, the products of evolution on a very dissimilar world, but they possess the technology to reshape themselves to look human. Varina would be an example of this. Varina looks like a human girl. She is in fact centuries old.

Varina has spent centuries educating human children, in the hope that civilized values will be second nature to the backward primitives. Now, the end of her service approaches. A starship has arrived. When it leaves, she will be aboard. Or at least, that is the plan.

Varina has one last task. She must take her latest students, Alta and Jason, to the Spiral Caves of Cosmic Consciousness. There they will gain a small hint of the scale of the universe.

There is only one tiny detail overlooked in Varina’s agenda. Many humans, former student Aron among them, chafe under the Delikon’s rule. They resent the Delikon attempts to make humans consider time scales too long for mayfly brains. For years, Aron has led efforts to progressively undermine Kalidor’s defenses. The Delikon have ignored the warning signs.

Varina’s expedition encounters the rebels. Having no inkling that there are any rebels at all, the alien and her entourage are easily captured. Now the rebels have a hostage… or if the Delikon refuse to parlay, someone on whom the humans can take out their fury.

~oOo~

Tor reissued a number of H. M. Hoover novels twenty years ago and it was my impression at the time that I’d somehow overlooked her back in the 1970s. Not the case. The cover art for The Rains of Eridan triggered memories, and while shuffling some paperbacks into and out of storage, I discovered I owned two more Hoovers: Return to Earth and this novel.

Both are from Avon, which (at the risk of vexing current and former Avon employees) teen me considered second-tier. Grossly unfair, as Avon did publish authors I collected — Blish, Butler, Le Guin, Simak, and Zelazny, for example — but they weren’t a publisher I particularly sought out. Perhaps it was their general taste in cover art, the unimpressive paper quality², or something as stupid as the lack of Avon ads in Analog.

The Delikon invasion of Earth appears to be a massive act of Get Off My Lawn. Delikon live very long lives and they dislike sudden change. Humans, being so short-lived, embody change and cannot help but irritate the adults. In fact, the adults are so inflexible they delegate managing the humans to Delikon children like Varina.

The Delikon are so confident in their rule that when they notice a large explosion roughly at the boundary of their defenses, their reaction is that the event is odd, rather than alarming.

This particular Hoover is an odd duck. The setup has tremendous potential for drama, which is not realized. As it turns out, the rebels’ skillset does not include any aptitude for preventing escapes, while the Delikon are relentlessly reasonable, at least by their lights. If the cost of remaining on Earth outweighs the meagre benefits, they will simply leave. After all, the primary goal of ensuring humans would never again master star-flight was accomplished long ago.

Is the lack of drama part of the point? Furthermore, given that the novel appeared towards the end of the Winds of Change, is there a subtext intended about colonialism? The humans, or at least some of them, are miserable under the Delikon. As the Delikon have impoverished the humans, this is reasonable. However, the humans are intemperate, some are violent, and the human belief that long planning horizons are inhuman does not suggest that the humans will thrive on their own.

The Delikon appears unavailable from the sources to which I customarily link. There does seem to be a Kindle edition from a certain Society for Preservation and Dissemination of Books We Love to Read, which I vaguely remember encountering earlier. I had no luck finding a website for that publisher and I don’t link to Amazon. In fact, if you drop a link to Amazon into comments, I will delete it. 

1: USA delenda.

2: Avon’s bookbinding was at least far superior to Lancer’s.