The Amsirs and the Iron Thorn by Algis Budrys

"Ah, when I am an Honor,/And go for my game,/The people of dirt will report my new name./The Eld he will shave me/And name my new name/And the people of iron will feast on my game./The beasts of the sand/Will grow fearful and tame./The Honor of iron/will have a new name!"

Reading Larry Niven Known Space stories in 1967 issues of If, I became interested in Algis Budrys' The Iron Thorn via Gray Morrow's illustrations of nude humans and pteranodon-people for the serialized version of the novel.  Is this some kind of Almuric or Eric John Stark planetary romance or sword and planet thing?  Via the sorcery of the internet archive, let's check out the 1967 American paperback edition of the novel, which has a Frank Frazetta cover and goes by the title The Amsirs and the Iron Thorn.

Our protagonist is a young hunter-warrior guy with javelins and an atlatl living in a primitive sort of society in which most people are farmers--farmers the fighting men like our hero, White Jackson, look down upon.   He is on his first hunt as the story begins, and we watch as he chases an Amsir--one of those pterosaur-men from the Morrow and Frazetta illos--through a desert at dusk.  Humans can only breathe within a certain distance of the Iron Thorn that sits in the center of the village, or if they are wearing special helmets and are in sight of the Thorn; the Thorn, we readers quickly realize, is an immobilized space ship.  Jackson steps in front of a big rock that blocks line of sight to the Thorn and finds he is suffering oxygen starvation, giving his quarry an opportunity to turn on him.  To Jackson's amazement, the creature speaks, telling him to surrender, and then attacks with a metal spear--Jackson had been led to believe the Amsirs were mere animals, not intelligent tool- and language-using people.

Jackson kills the Amsir and drags it back home.  On the way he meets his older brother, Black Jackson, a fellow fighting man, who takes the metal spear and tries to get White Jackson to promise not to tell anybody the truth about the Amsirs.

These first two chapters have a good plot, but Budrys' style doesn't make them an easy read.  The early pages of The Iron Thorn are overwritten, with lots of long sentences and long paragraphs full of extraneous details of geography and biology, descriptions that don't pack an emotional punch or paint a beautiful image or further the plot, as far as I could tell.  The action scene feels slow because Budrys describes in tedious detail everything White Jackson sees, everything White Jackson feels, and everything White Jackson thinks.

Back at the village, Jackson goes through the ceremonies that certify that he is now an Honor, a blooded fighting man (what constitutes a man is the theme of much of Budrys' work) which include getting a hair cut and having his title changed from White to Secon.  But Jackson isn't happy--instead he broods about life and death and why he and all the other people in the village have been lied to about the real nature of the Amsir.

As an Honor, Jackson is now permitted to enter the Thorn.  Inside, he has a serious convo with the Elder who is the ruler of the village.  Like his fight with the Asmir, Jackson's conversations with people tend to be overly long and overwritten, so reading them can be something of a slog.

Secon Jackson studied him [the Elder] the way he always studied things.  The grin was a lot less now, but it was still there.  Secon Jackson tried to think what he'd be thinking if he had that grin; that didn't often do much good, but this time it worked.  It had the feel of truth all over it.  The old man was thinking what a fool Secon Jackson would make of himself and how easy he'd be to handle if he went ahead and did what looked like a perfectly sensible thing to him.  All right, Secon Jackson thought, then I won't do it, and the next move is yours. 

I feel like the paragraph above is a lot of words that are not fun to read and which convey very little of intellectual or entertainment value.  Besides, I have stressful conversations in real life and don't read SF in hopes of finding my own boring and depressing real life experiences recreated on the page.  (Long time readers of MPorcius Fiction Log may recall I had similar complaints about Budrys' magnum opus, Rogue Moon.)

The meat of the conversation is the Elder's description of how the small elite of Honors runs the human village through control of information--for the people's own good, of course: the Honor's system maintains the Thorn that distills safe water and otherwise makes life possible and facilitates progress.  The Elder recognizes that Jackson is particularly clever and wants him to be part of this elite. 

Jackson, however, is not interested in joining the elite that has lied to him and everybody else.  As the middle third of the novel begins, Jackson leaves the village to surrender to the Amsirs, and he has to fight his fellow humans to make it over to where the Amsirs, it turns out, have a village and a Thorn of their own.  Inside the Amsir Thorn, Jackson is interrogated by the Amsir Elder, who conscripts him into the job of investigating a third, smaller, Thorn which the Amsirs call "the Object."  The door to this third machine is locked, and any Amsir who has tried to open it has been been grievously or fatally injured while doing so.  So far, the Object has not killed any human captives (they starve because humans can't eat the lichen Amsirs subsist on) but none of them have figured out how to get inside the Object, either.  

The Elder of the Amsirs speculates that the Object contains superweapons, and so he sets a watchman on Jackson, a hideously deformed and mentally retarded half-human, half-Amsir named Ahmuls; being almost human, the Object's automatic defense systems won't kill Ahmuls, and if Jackson gets inside this freak will kill our hero if he misbehaves.

(I don't need to tell you that this investigate-an-alien-object business bears similarities to the interesting portion of Rogue Moon.)   

The Object is operated by a computer, and Jackson figures out how to convince it to open the door and let him and his dimwitted shadow in.  With the exploration of the small spacecraft that is the Object,  The Amsirs and the Iron Thorn comes to life.  The Object computer, the robot doctor who treats Jackson, and Ahmuls, are all somewhat interesting and amusing characters, and in this part of the novel Budrys drops his long-winded superfluous style.  The Object computer crowns Jackson commander of the ship, and injects into his brain all the education that is the prerequisite for such a position, including a Liberal Arts BA and an MA in Command Psych.  

As the final third of the novel begins, Jackson and a chastened Ahmuls fly to Earth on the Object.  Now able to read, Jackson passes the time reading stories of Edgar Rice Burroughs' John Carter and Tarzan as well as Robert J. Hogan's G-8 and His Battle Aces.  When Ahmuls gets out of the doctor's office, Jackson explains to him (and to us readers) that the planet they were born on is Mars and the Amsirs are genetically modified humans.  (Ahmuls is a genetic throwback, a sport.)

Jackson expects to find the high tech Earth of skyscrapers and factories that produced the Thorns and the Amsirs and his recently acquired education, but his people have lived on Mars for many generations and the data that has been pumped into his noggin hasn't been current for centuries.  The Ohio Jackson lands in is now a prairie inhabited by nudist hippies who are coddled by the supercomputer that runs the Earth--the computer immediately reduces the Object to its component elements in the interest of environmental efficiency (I guess today we'd say "sustainability.")  What doesn't promote efficiency or the sustainability of reader interest is the return of Budrys' long conversations and overly detailed descriptions of everything.   

The hippies turn out to be decadent jerks, and Jackson finds that the computer runs the Earth and its inhabitants for their own good by controlling information, quantitatively different but not qualitatively unlike how the Honors run the human settlement on the red planet.  The men bully Ahmuls and resent Jackson as a possible rival for the attentions of the women, while the women jealously compete over him.  The computer, which can manipulate matter with trivial ease, builds a simulacrum of an Amsir and Jackson has to fight it for everybody's entertainment; the people of Earth become fascinated by life on Mars and we readers have to machete our way through a jungle of words describing how the computer builds for the Earthers an amusement park version of the Thorn and its surrounding area.

Through the translucent walls of the Thorn came light; from here the walls of the Thorn burst with all colors--green and gold, red and violent, blue and rust.  The colors swirled and swept around each other in a pattern different from the not-quite-random swirlings of the inner webwork, which in turn took what it pleased of them and threw it back to Jackson and [Earth girl] Durstine in a shower of shifting pinpoints.

Zzzzzzzzzzz....

There is a party in the imitation Thorn that maybe is supposed to be a parody of beatnik culture--pretentious poetry about death and resentment of authority is recited and people snap their fingers in response, and a woman vacuously blabs about the need to express one's self.  People dress up in what they think is the way Jackson's people on Mars dress; perhaps this is Budrys commenting on the foolish reverence of 18th- and 19th-century romantics for the noble savage and 20th-century leftists' adoration of Third Worlders.  One guy presents a painting of the human Thorn on Mars.  Jackson, who in the first third of the novel produced some drawings, draws something for the assembled Earthers himself--these scenes, I guess, are Budrys telling us that art can both deceive and serve oppressors and reveal truths and promote freedom (back on Mars one of Jackson's drawings revealed the truth that the Amsirs were an intelligent tool-using species.)

Jackson wants to return to Mars, and Budrys somewhat obliquely suggests we readers think of him as Tarzan in Europe, wanting to return to Africa.  The computer, however, refuses to make Jackson a space ship, so he sets off to live alone with one of the Earthwomen who has taken a shine to him; the computer compares them to Adam and Eve.

When Jackson was aboard the space ship I was thinking I could give The Amsirs and the Iron Thorn a mixed review and say it was acceptable, but the last third is even more annoying than the first third so I have to give the novel a thumbs down.  The plot--even though it is lacking much in the way of climax--is not bad, and the theme of elites who oppress us while ostensibly protecting us from reality is fine, but Budrys' style renders most of the book very slow and tedious.  Too bad.