The Lani People by J. F. Bone

Legally and biologically the Lani weren't human.  But they were intelligent, upright, bipedal mammals whose morphology was so close to man's that it had taken the ultimate test to settle their status.  And being a Betan, Kennon was suspicious of the accuracy of that ultimate test.

Some time ago I spotted a 1962 Bantam paperback copy of J. F. Bone's The Lani People and bought it for the princely sum of four dollars.  The text on the book's back cover had me wondering if this was a feminist novel about how men treat women like crap, or a misogynist novel about how women are so impossible to deal with that men would jump at the chance to embrace some alternative means of satisfying their...needs...should such an alternative come on the scene.  I read a story by Bone back in 2015 that Judith Merril, widely acclaimed anthologist, judged worth republishing, and MPorcius, unknown goofball, judged "a weak joke," but let's give The Lani People a chance anyway.  At the very least, the red cover illo of nude girls with tails, and an extravagant ad inside (see below), are compelling. 

It is about 6,000 years in the future, and the human race dominates the galaxy, having defeated many other intelligent species and colonized over 6,000 planets.  These 6,000 worlds are pretty independent and have distinct cultures.  

Our protagonist is recent veterinary school graduate Jac Kennon.  Kennon is from planet Beta, one of the most technologically advanced of the human planets, whose people are known for their honesty, moral fortitude and punctiliousness.  He is presently on planet Kardon, which has only been inhabited by humans for 500 years, and has less technology and a more free-spirited, entrepreneurial, frontier attitude.  Most Betans would avoid such a planet, but Kennon's father was a space ship captain, and young Jac spent many years on space ships and among non-Betans, and is thus more adventurous than most of his countrymen.

Answering a want ad, he takes a job as chief vet at Outworld Enterprises Incorporated, a big agricultural concern owned by the Alexander family, whose ancestors were leaders of the conquest of Kardon.  President Alexander X. M. Alexander owns the largest share of the business, but not a controlling interest; however he is currently able to run the place because he has temporary control of the shares of one of his cousins, a fat jerk named Douglas.  I didn't really understand this business with Douglas's shares, because Douglas is an adult who is in charge of a department of Outworld, flies aircraft and carries a gun, but humans in the future of the novel live to be four or five hundred years old, so maybe that has something to do with it.  Anyway, when Douglas comes of age, Alexander X. M. will be in trouble because he doesn't get along with Douglas or any other of his relatives.

Outworld's primary business is raising and selling cattle and swine--even after thousands of years, people still think real meat tastes better than vat-grown "meat."  But our story is concerned with Outworld's breeding and selling of Lani, a species of humanoid native to an isolated island on Kardon named Flora.  Lani can talk and read, and are employed by Outworld as agricultural laborers and office clerks, and except for their tails they look identical to human women--but legally they are animals, and so can be bought and sold.  Much of the tension in the novel is based on the fact that the Lani are practically human, but are treated as beasts by Outworld's employees and customers--bred eugenically, worked as slaves, sold to customers.  

Kennon's response to proximity to and responsibility for Lani causes him considerable anxiety.  Lani don't wear clothes, and are eager to have sex with human men, and Kennon is distracted by their naked bodies and sexual availability.  He can't bring himself to dissect dead Lani--he decided to become a vet and not an MD in the first place because he couldn't bear to work on human bodies.  Luckily, as head vet, he doesn't have to carve up Lani cadavers himself--he has Lani assistants who can handle the actual cutting while he instructs and observes.  The legal status of the Lani also has particular resonance for him as a Betan.  The genetic differences between Lani and humans are slight, but enough that the interstellar courts have ruled that the Lani are animals, not people, so can be treated as property like cows and goats.  Well, Beta has a sun that produces a high level of radiation, meaning that the humans on Beta are evolving more quickly than most human populations--thus far in ways that are mostly invisible to the naked eye, but over time the Betan population might become distinct enough that the interstellar courts could conceivably classify them as nonhuman, which would rob them of their legal rights.

This set up sounds like a decent vehicle for Bone to discuss things like imperialism and eugenics and racism and sexism and slavery and so forth, and the back cover of the book makes it sound like the novel is going to be full of weird sex and radical speculations on how technology is going to change the relationships between the sexes.  Unfortunately, there is very little of any of that potentially engaging material, and the book is quite slow-paced and quite boring besides, especially the first third of the text, so it took me a long time to read as I found myself distracted by books of anecdotes about WWII RAF personnel (such as J. Alwyn Phillips' Valley of the Shadow of Death, Peter Rees' Lancaster Men and Mel Rolfe's Looking Into Hell) and various disreputable giallos and mangas (although maybe I'm supposed to say gialli and maaaahhhhnga.)

The first 50 of The Lani People's 152 pages cover a period of two or three days and introduce us to the whole situation and our principal human characters and a subplot about a parasitic infestation the Lani on Flora are suffering.  Bone spends a lot of time, much of it via dialogue between Jac Kennon and other characters, explaining in detail Outworld's operations and the way the parasites propagate and how Kennon hopes to defeat them.  None of this is very emotionally involving--the characters are not very compelling and we don't get a sense that the stakes are high--people don't seem scared or angry or anything.

Things get a little more interesting as the second third of the novel begins and we flash forward ten months to find Keenon has put an end to the Lani parasite infestation (like the matter of Douglas's shares, the business with the parasites seems important but is soon forgotten) and at the same time rationalized and rendered far more efficient all Outworld's operations, setting up a vaccination program for the beef and pork departments, for example.  Then we get a smidgen of human feeling, as we learn one of Keenon's Lani assistants, Copper, is in love with him, and he admits to himself he is in love with her!  Many human men on Kardon have sexual relationships with Lani, but Keenon's upbringing as a Betan makes it extremely difficult to admit his love for a nonhuman to himself, much less act on it.  You see, the genetic drift experienced by the Betan population has fostered a powerful miscegenation taboo on Beta--Betans find the idea of sex with non-Betan humans repulsive, and sex with nonhumans unthinkable.  

Another revelation occurs before the novel's halfway mark.  Keenon has been told, and the Lani on Flora believe, that there are no male Lani and all the new Lani are the product of artificial high tech genetic engineering.  This is not true--on a fortified island, Otpen, is penned up a population of stud Lani, big muscular males bred for strength.  In what is apparently Bone satirizing or commenting on individualism and competition (which he seems to be equating with "Social Darwinism"*), overweight jerk Douglas Alexander, who is in charge of Otpen, describes to Keenon (who has traveled to Otpen to deal with an outbreak of food poisoning) how the male Lani are trained to be ruthlessly selfish, to fight amongst themselves for dominance and the right to breed. 

*Bone doesn't use the words "Darwinism" or "Social," but Douglas claims the system of training the breeding the male Lani was devised by an ancestor of his who based it on "an old book--something about the noble savage, natural selection and survival of the fittest."  The inclusion of the phrase "noble savage" is a little odd, I guess a reflection of the muddled thinking of the Alexanders.

A bigger revelation follows.  Serendipitously, Keenon discovers a radioactive crater on Flora, and then Copper chants to him some of the secret oral tradition literature of the Lani, and Keenon figures out that the Lani are the (mutant) descendants of human pioneers who crash landed on Flora four thousand years ago.  So, he can have sex with Copper with a clear conscience and if he can get evidence of the Lanis' true ancestry off of planet Kardon, the interstellar government will declare the Lani human and liberate them from slavery.    

As I guess we expect in a SF story, Keenon isn't just a trained veterinarian who is also an expert at hand to hand combat (Douglas contrives a situation in which Keenon has to fight for his life against a male Lani and the Betan handles the powerful creature with ease)--he also knows how to repair a 4,000-year-old star ship.  But it will take him six months or so to do so if he only has Copper's help, and, in the final third of the novel, plot developments pile up that put him under some time pressure.  For one thing, Copper becomes pregnant with his child.  This is the first time in forty generations that a Lani has been impregnated by a human, and is undeniable proof that Lani are human.  This has to be kept secret--if the Alexanders find out they might kill Keenon and Copper in order to keep the Lanis' legitimate claim to human rights from being recognized.  The idea of aborting the child to keep the secret is raised but Cooper and Keenon reject this expedient out of hand--they are confident that abortion is murder. 

President Alexander X. M. Alexander then calls a big meeting at which Keenon realizes that the Prez is a telepath who can read minds, so our hero has to struggle to keep his secrets away from the forefront of his consciousness.  In this he succeeds.  By more conventional methods of snooping, Douglas finds out about Keenon's plan to escape with Cooper in the ancient ship just before our heroes are going to lift off.  Cooper shows her resourcefulness by tricking Douglas and then knocking him unconscious.  The old ship takes off, and Douglas, trying to shoot it down, accidentally kills himself.

Unlike newer vessels, the old space ship is subject to Einsteinian time dilation, so a trip to Beta that feels like a few months to Keenon and Copper takes ten years.  We readers get a glimpse of Beta, which seems like a technocratic welfare state where a submissive populace carefully follows all the rules and customs and reveres scientists, engineers and doctors as a kind of aristocracy or secular priesthood.  Alexander X. M. Alexander arrives on Beta, having spent a decade hunting Keenon, whom he considers murdered Douglas, stole Copper and broke his contract as Outworld's top vet.  (When you live to be 450 or so years old, spending a decade on a legal dispute isn't as big a deal for you as it would be for you and me.)  When President Alexander learns that the Lani are legally human he agrees to free them, and Bone ends his book on a hopeful redemptive note--Keenon and Copper return to planet Kardon to work for Outworld helping the Lani assimilate into a new way of life on a new planet that can be their homeland, Bone suggesting people are flawed but reformable.

The Lani People is pretty cold, flat, slow and boring--nothing in it inspires excitement or reflection on the part of the reader.  The sex and violence is scant, the characters are bland, the arguments and speculations lukewarm.  The text, with its veiled attacks on free enterprise and business competition, suggest Bone is some kind of pinko, but he doesn't promote socialism or technocracy with any kind of passion or reasoned arguments, so these attacks don't offer the reader any emotional or intellectual stimulation.  Lacking the "oomph" required of a successful adventure story, or human drama, or speculative exercise, I've gotta give The Lani People a (marginal) thumbs down. 

I think it is a dud, but The Lani People has been reprinted repeatedly and translated into Dutch, German and Italian.  My copy, Bantam J2363, includes not only totally fallacious back cover text but also an ad for Bantam's line of science fiction paperbacks that features absurdly over-the-top prose promoting the idea that SF is scary and funny ("It can be so nightmarishly, ghoulishly humorous that your laughter seems like a cry in hell") and an illustration of some sort of creepy birdman.