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Novel Review: Next of Kin by Eric Frank Russell
Next of Kin by Eric Frank Russell, 1959, 1964, 181pp
TLDR: A campy SF novel from the 50's in which a too-clever scout must escape from a potentially hostile planet seemingly run by the keystone cops.
Next of Kin is an entertaining, if dated, SF novel from the 50's. It's pace is brisk, and it's character is too clever for everyone around him.
SYNOPSIS
Dissatisfied with the numbskulls around him on earth, Scout-Officer John Leeming volunteers to fly an experimentally fast space ship across the front lines and into enemy territory - the purpose, I guess, is to see how far it can go undetected, and if it is detected it must be destroyed. Who's the numbskull?
Leeming manages to get well behind enemy lines when something goes wrong with his ship. Since he can't land it properly (you know, with the pointy end up and the fins end down) he has to crash land it on his side, and he finds himself trapped on a bureaucratic planet so far behind the lines than nobody really knows what a human is.
After exploring the wilderness a bit and stealing to survive, Leeming ends up getting captured and must clever his way out of jail and find some way of getting to the space port (where, of course, all the ships stand properly upright and must be accessed by ladders up the side).
Leeming's ultimate fate depends on how well he can out-caper the keystone cops and numbskull bureaucrats who run the prisons, which I gather was a feature of Russell's body of work.
ANALYSIS
Ultimately, I found the novel to be entertaining enough, if not entirely convincing. It shows it's age in some ways (no female characters being one) but not insufferably so. It had some amusing parts, but was probably a little to pat and predictable. And I didn't believe for a minute that anyone would have been fooled by Leeming's scheme. Chalk this down as one of those interesting 'artifact of science-fiction' novels - it's certainly not a high concept book. 3 out of 5
Comments
It sounds like something formulaic he churned out to pay the bills. But there's nothing wrong with that!