Garbage World by Charles Platt

"You know how we feel about off-worlders.  Nothing personal, mind, but we can't take their lily-white, pansy-faced pious attitudes.  Don't like 'em dropping their garbage on us, then complaining because we're not clean like they are." 

The water- and sticker-damaged copy
of Garbage World from the MPorcius
Library's Joachim Boaz wing

Seeing as in my last blog post I gushed about the Keith Roberts cover of the issue of New Worlds in which Charles Platt's Garbage World debuted, I figured it was about time I actually read Platt's novel.  Garbage World was serialized in New Worlds in 1966, and appeared in book form in 1967--I own a copy of that 1967 printing which was donated to the MPorcius Library by Joachim Boaz last year; I believe it must be the copy he read when he reviewed the novel back in 2015.  Our man tarbandu reviewed it way way back in 2010, when we were young!  Both tarbandu and Joachim gave Garbage World a mere two stars out of five--will we at the quixotic endeavor we call MPorcius Fiction Log concur with the assessments of our benefactors and give this work a negative vote, or strike a discordant tone and champion it as an unfairly maligned masterpiece?  Let's see!

Oliver Roach lives in a part of the galaxy full of asteroids.  Via the use of gravity generators, these asteroids have Earth-like gravity and atmosphere, and all but one are peaceful and orderly "pleasure worlds."  Roach is an information expert who manages and analyzes vast amounts of data about the asteroids; he has traveled to hundreds of them over his career, collecting data to catalog and synthesize.  As Garbage World begins, Roach is acting as assistant to an anthropologist and government minister, Larkin, as Larkin travels to the unique asteroid Kopra.  As you no doubt already know, "kopros" is the Greek word for dung, and Kopra is the asteroid where all the hundreds of pleasure asteroids shoot their garbage, and the place is now miles deep in refuse!  Two or three generations ago a spaceship got stuck on Kopra, and the descendants of that ship's crew have lived on Kopra ever since, surviving by eating not-quite spoiled food scavenged from the crash sites of the garbage containers that land on the asteroid daily; they build their homes from scrap metal and plastic similarly collected.  The Koprans have developed a whole distinct and resonant culture and social hierarchy of their own on the garbage world, one based on scavenging--he who has the best hoard of scavenged items is the leader, and gets first dibs on every new heap of trash that falls out of the sky.  The Koprans are a happy people whose social life revolves around drunken parties (just about the only thing they can produce locally is a crude and powerful alcohol they call "homebrew.").

I really like these Keith Roberts covers.

Larkin and Roach meet the ruler of Kopra, Isaac Gaylord (grandson of the captain that crashed his ship on Kopra), to tell him that Kopra's gravity generator is about to dangerously malfunction because the asteroid's balance has shifted due to all the garbage being added to it unevenly over the decades.  The asteroid must be evacuated for ten days so a new gravity generator can be installed.  Gaylord's daughter, Juliette, immediately becomes powerfully attracted to Roach, and essentially throws herself at him.  She is pretty, but she smells, and, as Roach learns when she impulsively kisses him, even tastes, like garbage, which sickens Roach.  Gaylord's son Norman is also interested in Roach and Larkin, but his passion is not amorous--he hopes his fortuitous meeting with Larkin and Roach can somehow get him off this asteroid and to a cleaner and more advanced one--the people of Kopra have scavenged TVs and can watch transmissions from the pleasure asteroids and know all about how the inhabitants of the other asteroids live.  Most Koprans have contempt for the people of the clean asteroids, but Norman is a dissenter who rejects his native culture.

Juliette's aggressive pursuit of Roach is only one of several complications the data expert has to face on Kopra.  He eavesdrops on a conversation between Larkin and Captain Sterril (groan) of the engineering team that arrived shortly after Larkin and Roach himself did, ostensibly to install the new gravity generator deep in a hole in the asteroid, and gets the idea that there is more to this mission than meets the eye, that Larkin is keeping something from him and from the Koprans.  Gaylord's hoard is stolen, so that his son Norman becomes head of the village.  And Roach learns that there are Koprans who live outside of Gaylord's village, nomads and tramps who travel the wastes, and Larkin gives Roach the job of driving out into the mutant jungles and garbage dunes of Kopra in the expedition's "desert tractor" to try to collect these hardy individualists so they too can be evacuated.  Roach will need a guide out in the wastes, and Gaylord volunteers himself and Juliette--Gaylord wants to talk to the nomads because he figures it was a nomad who stole his hoard, and his daughter is a necessary adjunct as she is experienced at traversing the wilderness, where she regularly scavenges while dad stays in the village managing the affairs of its hundred or so citizens.

There is plenty of fiction in which a guy from a more advanced or somehow superior society visits a less sophisticated or otherwise inferior society and switches sides or goes native, like those movies Dances With Wolves, Last Samurai and Avatar (full disclosure: I've never actually watched any of those movies from beginning to end) and Garbage World is another one.  Interestingly, Platt dedicates Garbage World to Michael Moorcock, with whom he worked at New Worlds (Platt did a lot of the art direction for the magazine), and again and again in Moorcock's fiction we see characters who go native or switch sides and end up fighting against their homelands or original allies (I'm thinking of the Elric and Bastable stories here, as well as the Erekose novel The Eternal Champion, and I have vague memories of other examples.)  You might even say that Moorcock and Platt have lived out (less violent and melodramatic versions of) such narratives, both of them having left their native England to live in the United States.

The drive in the desert tractor is a disaster: the vehicle breaks down due to sabotage, and Roach, Gaylord and Juliette are almost killed by a monster and then in a rare storm.  They are rescued from these life-threatening events by the nomads Roach left the village to rescue--after saving them the nomads reject Roach's help, refusing to be evacuated.  Roach stumbles upon further evidence that Larkin and Sterril are up to no good, and, more importantly, he comes to feel at home on smelly, filthy Kopra.

Oliver no longer noticed the dirt around him.  He had become a part of the planet, on equal terms with the Koprans.  The smell of the place could never be called pleasant, and his throat was still a trifle raw--but he'd got to the stage where he didn't notice any of it.  Gaylord had been right; in a way, dirt suited him.  He was happier and more relaxed than ever before.

Roach and Juliette surrender to their desire for each other--like John Carter, Oliver Roach has arrived on a barbaric world and quickly come to prefer it to his own and become the lover of a native princess.  (As you probably know, Edgar Rice Burroughs was a big influence on Moorcock.)

Our three dirty heroes return to the village on foot.  They find that new headman Norman, his father and sister presumed dead, has tried to clean up the town; they also learn that it is Norman who stole his father's hoard and sabotaged the desert tractor (Juliette explains to Roach that Norman was adopted and never felt a part of the family and would spend all his time trying to clean himself and watching TV shows depicting clean life on other asteroids.)  Roach goes to confront Larkin and learns that Sterill's team, which just left the asteroid, did not install a new gravity generator in that deep hole of theirs but rather a powerful shaped charge that will neatly break Kopra into four smaller garbage asteroids where nobody will be allowed to reside.  The population of Gaylord's village will be carried off to have their brains altered, their dirt-loving personalities replaced with squeaky clean personalities so they can be settled on other asteroids.  (Larkin is willing to callously leave the nomads to die during the explosion.)  Norman has complicated this drama by sabotaging the high tech bomb, putting down into the hole a less advanced remote-controlled explosive of his own that has the potential to spoil the carefully calibrated explosion planned by Larkin--if Larkin refuses to help Norman achieve his goals he can blow up the asteroid in such a way that it spreads filth all over the pleasure asteroids.  (If Larkin's and Norman's activities don't necessarily make sense to the reader, Platt makes sure to indicate they are both insane as a way to paper over any gaps in his plot.)

The redoubtable and resourceful Gaylord seizes control of events, and in the last thirty or so pages of the novel (which is less than 140 pages total) leads Roach, Juliette, and the villagers to victory over Larkin and Norman.  The villagers (including a cowed Norman) crowd into the ship and escape, while Kopra explodes behind them, Larkin and all those nomads being killed.  The villagers celebrate aboard the ship as garbage spreads throughout the asteroid field--soon every asteroid will be as foul as Kopra was.

Garbage World has the form and content of a traditional SF short novel--a guy arrives on another planet, goes native, learns a truth about his own society, and participates in a revolution/paradigm shift that remakes society.  It is also largely a goof and a satire--observe the Dickensian names of the characters--the leader of the party-hearty villagers is named Gaylord, his daughter who falls in love with a man from the society her father despises is called Juliette, his son who wants to live a normal clean life is Norman, etc.  There are lots of slapsticky jokes revolving around people's love or hate of dirt, and the most blatantly silly element of all is Platt's chapter titles (e. g.; "The Great Purgative Plan," and "The Defecated Village"--even the mundane chapter titles, like "The Hole" and "The Deserted Excavation," in context, bring to mind bowel movements.)

I've suggested that Platt's story could be a parody of Edgar Rice Burroughs stories--one element of this is how it is not Roach who does most of the hero stuff, but Gaylord.  The effort of Norman to turn his filthy village into a nice clean and orderly hamlet felt a little like a spoof of the Scouring of the Shire part of Lord of the Rings.  (Another possible Moorcock influence?--Moorcock famously hates J. R. R. Tolkien's work.)

On a somewhat more serious note, Larkin's talk of cleanliness reminded me of Victorian and Edwardian sanitation and eugenics campaigns--Larkin, apparently a cleanliness fanatic, links physical cleanliness to moral cleanliness--maybe Larkin is a sort of spoof of a bourgeois reformer or imperialist who considers the lower classes or other races to be sub- or inhuman, people who need to be controlled, either radically reformed or simply eliminated.  One of the odd things about Garbage World is its blithe dismissal of the value of sanitation and sobriety--Platt unabashedly celebrates acceptance of filth and participation in drunken orgies, as if a bias towards sanitation and sobriety is just a matter of taste or even a form of close-minded bigotry.  Maybe we should see Garbage World as a reflection of 1960s counterculture values, a somewhat irrational or tongue-in-cheek rejection of the bourgeois values of "squares" in the form of a wacky light-hearted novel.  We might also compare Garbage World's off-the-wall attitude about dirt to Theodore Sturgeon's 1967 "If All Men Were Brothers, Would You Let One Marry Your Sister?," in which a space traveler learns that the key to building a utopia is for a society to reject the incest taboo.

Garbage World is sort of pedestrian, but I found it mildly entertaining; the odd society Platt devised for the book is fun and the jokes (e.g., Gaylord stamping on his son's brand new flower garden and throwing his new curtains out the window) are obvious but sort of funny.  I kind of like it--Garbage World isn't brilliant or groundbreaking or beautiful, but it was certainly not boring or irritating.  I guess I'm disagreeing with tarbandu and Joachim Boaz on this one; if I used numbered ratings I would give Garbage World a three or 3.5, a mild recommendation.