Earthblood by Keith Laumer and Rosel George Brown

“I’m all Terry,” Roan said. “Raff was only my foster father. Ma wasn’t really human. They lived all their lives in a garbage dump on account of me and Dad got killed on account of me."

Back in 2022 I read two novels by Rosel George Brown, Sibyl Sue Blue and the sequel, Waters of Centaurus.  They weren't bad, but better was Brown's short story "David's Daddy," which I read in 2023.  Brown died at a tragically young age and only produced one other novel, a collaboration with Keith Laumer that was serialized in If in 1966 titled Earthblood.  As for Laumer, I have blogged about quite a few things by him and it is a real mixed bag; plenty of stories I liked, but also plenty of stories I judged filler and others I thought a waste of time.

Earthblood seems to have been a success, seeing reprint again and again, including in Swedish, Portuguese and German, as well as a Bluejay edition with many illustrations by Alan Gutierrez.  When I blogged about some of the other stories in an issue of If which includes a segment of the novel, one of my well-read commenters had nice things to say about Earthblood.  So let's snag a PDF scan of one of the paperback editions of the book (the Berkeley 1968 printing with a Richard Powers cover, one of, in my opinion, Powers' least effective covers) and check out this piece of work, one component of the regrettably brief catalog of Brown's fiction and of Laumer's large body of published work.  (I'll note here that this novel seems to take place in the same universe as the Bolo books, and Bolos make a brief appearance.)

The prologue introduces us to Raff, a human man, and his wife Bella, a Yill, some kind of almost-human alien with blue skin and eyes with vertical pupils.  Their species are only two among the many intelligent races that make up a chaotic interstellar civilization.  Raff and Bella want to parent a human boy, and so purchase on the grey market from a bird-man a human embryo, purportedly that of some kind of aristocrat with excellent genes; their purchase incurs tremendous financial sacrifice and Raff and Bella have to engage in a bloody fight with a multicultural gang of aliens who also want the superior human embryo

Bella has the embryo implanted in her womb, and she and Raff raise the boy, naming him Roan; the novel's 25 numbered chapters relate to us Roan's exciting life and career.  We follow the kid's growth in a poor ghetto inhabited by pterosaur-people.  Throughout the novel, and in these early parts especially, Laumer and Brown do a solid job making all the characters feel real--they exhibit believable emotions and behave in understandable ways and participate in meaningful relationships with each other.  The humans and the Yills (Raff and Bella have a Yill slave, one of the aliens they outfought when they secured Roan's embryo) have psychologies we readers can identify with, while the bird people and pterosaur people and fish people and lizard people and on and on have psychologies that are quite alien but make sense.

As Roan learns galactic history, so do we.  The humans of Terra were the first to develop space travel and they mastered the galaxy, founding an empire to maintain order among the many intelligent species which gained space travel by emulating humanity.  Raff and Bella's Yill slave asserts that only humans could have built the first space ship, and Raff just out and out tells Roan that humans are superior.  This superiority is demonstrated when we see Roan dealing with the other kids in the neighborhood.  The pterodactyl-kids goof on Roan because he doesn't have wings and try to bully him, but Roan is able to dominate them when he so chooses thanks to his superior ability to use logic to manipulate his environment.  When cruel upper-class lizard-people kids come to abuse the dim-witted pterosaur-kids, Roan tries to protect the pterosaur-kids, taking on the natural role of the human race, that of maintaining order and meting out justice among the lesser races.  (We are reminded of the lines in the sixth book of the Aeneid that assert that the role of Rome is to rule the world, to spare the conquered and battle down the proud.)   

Lately, though, Terra and its people have faced some tough times.  Extragalactic aliens, like five thousand years ago, invaded the Earth space empire and defeated its space navy and put a blockade on Terra, and nobody has left or landed on Earth for all those centuries.  Immediately upon hearing this, patriotic readers like myself are hoping Roan is going to lead the campaign to make Earth great again by sending these extragalactic bastards, the Niss, to hell and putting mankind and its buddies back where we belong, on top of the heap!  At the same time, twist endings being so common in SF, we are worried that Raff and the Yill slave are full of BS and that by the end of the story Roan will realize that Terra was evil and the Niss are the good guys--this generates some dramatic tension as we advance further into the 285-page novel.

In his late teens, Roan sneaks into a travelling circus without a ticket, gets nabbed, and tries to fight his way out.  Raff comes to help, but gets killed and the circus carries off Roan to other planets--the tentacled owner of the circus has never seen a pure-strained human before (most humans today beyond Terra are mutants or crossbreeds, genetically engineered to better fit alien environments) and wants to pay Roan to be a freak and wire walker in his circus.  (Roan again and again in the novel exhibits great agility and speed.)  In the way a guy today might have a hobbyist's interest in ancient Rome, and admire the accomplishments of the Roman Empire, this alien is a Terra buff.

Aboard the circus ship we get the idea that the galactic civilization, bereft of Terran leadership, has grown technologically stagnant and culturally decadent.  There is no music, for example, and the spaceships everybody flies around are relics from the time before the Niss attack that largely operate automatically.  Among the carnies and geeks, Roan demonstrates how different pure-strain Terrans are from aliens and from mutant humans.  For one thing, Terrans have empathy and a sense of justice, while other races are fatalistic and casually cruel.  Roan gets revenge on the fish-man who killed Raff and gets a human(ish) girlfriend, an erotic dancer.  When Roan worries someone will figure out he killed the fishman, his lover suggests nobody cares if some working-class brute got killed--Roan, she says is thinking like a Terran.  Similarly, Roan insists on helping an injured carny when everyone else is willing to leave him to die.  

Perhaps more interesting and "sciency" than the idea that pure-blood Earthers are more empathic and moral than aliens and muties is the idea that, for the most part, the many nonhuman alien races act on instinct--they know how to fly or whatever without study or education while, in contrast, humans must learn new things and need to practice new skills to master them.

The circus ship is taken by a pirate ship; all but two of the carnies--Roan and a hulking metallic professional fighter--die in the fight, crushed by the acceleration as the automatic vessel engages in evasive maneuvers.  The captain of the pirates is a human of pure or almost pure strain; he is a sort of privateer or long distance scout connected to the far distant remnants of the Terran space navy and he aspires to put the human race back in charge of the anarchic galaxy, and is searching the galaxy for pure-strain humans like Roan.  Initially Roan is bitter that the pirates killed all his colleagues (including his girlfriend) but a friendship with the pirate captain is cemented after the two human men save each others' lives during fights (this novel is chock-full of fights) and Roan visits an abandoned human city, largely intact after 5,000 years because human-built robots have maintained it, and sees how awesome the Terran Empire must have been.

For five years the two humans and their alien and mutant crew search for other humans and collect supplies by raiding aliens.  They come upon a rare Niss ship and their vessel is crippled in the fight; again those who have become Roan's closest friends are killed, but Roan and some of the mutant crew escape the wreck in a boat and board the miles-long Niss ship, which has been running on automatic for thousands of years, its Niss crew nothing but bones.  During the campaign which saw the Niss, in what now appears to have been a Pyrrhic victory, overthrow Terran rule of the galaxy, this Niss vessel captured a smaller Terran ship and Roan finds that this Earth ship is fully functional.  Roan commandeers it and he and his motley crew head to the planet where Roan grew up, he hoping to find his foster mother Bella the Yill, and her slave Yill, still alive and able to tell him who his genetic parents were.

Mom killed herself after Raff was killed and Roan kidnapped, but the slave is still alive.  Following clues, Roan and his pirates make a decade-long journey to Alpha Centauri, committing acts of piracy on the way.  Through trickery and violence, Roan and three of his senior pirates infiltrate the rump Terran space navy.  The current Navy is totally unconnected from Earth, which they think is behind an impenetrable Niss blockade, and the officers of the Terran navy prove themselves, in the main, to be brutal and incompetent bigots, no better than the ruthless and violent aliens and mutants Roan has spent his life interacting with.  The navy officers revere pure-strain humans, but most of them and their men are themselves mutants and crossbreeds.  Roan learns that he, as an embryo, was a rare specimen meant to be breeding stock that was stolen and fought over. 

Almost immediately, Roan learns that the ranks of the navy are riven, that a coup against the Admiral is planned, and he has to choose which side of the divide to join--which side is more likely to get Roan to Terra, where he is sure lies his destiny?  In the aftermath of the coup attempt, Roan is imprisoned in a slimy pit where he has to fight a rat and pass many days in a fever, near starvation.  His pirate comrades rescue him and they go to Earth, finding the Niss blockade ships little more than lifeless hulks.

At first Earth appears to be something of a paradise, with intelligent talking dogs and beautiful pure strain humans living in orderly and bucolic surroundings, in glass towers among lovely gardens.  But the upper-class Terrans are disturbingly feminized and there is a rigid class system in which some Terrans are docile dim-witted slaves, doing the work that in earlier ages was done by horses, like pulling carts, and others barely eke out an existence in slums built of huts among crumbling ruins of ancient cities.  Roan hopes to inspire the upper-class Terrans with the knowledge that Terra is no longer cut off from the larger galaxy, and tries to warn them that the corrupt remnants of the Navy, when they realize the Niss blockade is toothless, may try to raid or conquer Earth, but the upper-class Terrans are totally decadent, interested only in pleasure, unambitious and unable to defend themselves--the dogs, which have hands for paws and can walk upright, do their policing and fighting for them.

Roan learns that he is the son or clone of a Terran space war hero of thousands of years ago, a man of the formative crusading era in which the Terran Empire was established whose frozen body was discovered a few decades ago.  (The cycles of history stuff in Earthblood, and the idea that people on the frontier are hardy, brave and resourceful while people back in the metropole are decadent and perverted reminds me of similar material in Poul Anderson's work, and to a lesser extent in Robert Heinlein's.)  Several of the Terran chapters of Laumer and Brown's novel consist largely of parties and performances that demonstrate how deracinated and immoral the virtually immortal Terrans are; one shindig is the vandalism of an art museum where works of art familiar to us readers like the Mona Lisa are destroyed one by one, and one performance is a striptease in which the woman after shedding her clothes attempts to commit suicide with a knife.  Earlier in the novel it was brought home to us that Terrans have a will to survive that aliens lack, and Laumer and Brown highlight how far native Terrans have fallen by suggesting they have lost that will to live and taken the attitude toward death we saw among aliens.

Roan interrupts the dancer's suicide attempt and escapes into a disgusting slum in a ruin with the help of the dancer (our latest love interest, again an erotic dancer) and the dog assigned to Roan, who, dog-fashion, has become loyal to Roan over the native-born Terrans.  For a year they hide in the slum while police dogs hunt them.  Finally, Roan decides that he can hide no longer and has a showdown with the leader of the police dogs.  Roan gets the lower-class slum Terrans to rise against the dogs and the upper-class humans, and at just the right moment Roan's pirate comrades arrive in a Navy space battleship they seized and over the course of the last year crewed.  Roan and his people overthrow the decadent upper-class Terrans and we are lead to believe they will unite the pure-strain Terrans, the intelligent dogs, and the mutants of the pirates and the Navy into a decent polity and lay the groundwork for a new Terran Empire that will spread order and justice throughout the galaxy.

I can moderately recommend Earthblood, which is well-written on a sentence-by-sentence basis and has lots of action and lots of relationships and tackles interesting ideas, but it is good, not great, as there are problems when looked at as a whole that render it less than the sum of its parts. 

For one thing, the novel feels long, partly because the same sort of thing happens again and again--similar gory fights, imprisonments and rescues; Roan proving how fast he is again and again; people getting killed in the course of trying to help Roan again and again; people holding each other at gunpoint again and again; people being maimed again and again; mortally wounded people begging to be finished off again and again (as I have suggested, welcoming death is a recurring motif of the novel.)  At 285 pages, Earthblood is long compared to the SF novels I typically read, though I hear that 21st-century SF novels are typically even longer.  For people who read SF novels to meet likable characters and get cozy with them and spend pleasant times with them, long novels probably make sense.  If you read SF to encounter strange ideas and find surprises and experience awe and horror, a long novel is less welcome--the first time a guy discovers something amazing and almost gets killed and sees his friends and enemies torn asunder or burned to a crisp, it shakes you up, but if the same dude has those same sorts of capers again and again it loses its effect on you, or at least on me.

Another problem with Earthblood is that the milieus and scenarios Roan finds himself in get less interesting as the novel progresses.  Being the only human kid growing up in a pteranodon-man ghetto among flying people who are oppressed by haughty lizard-people is strange and compelling, as are Roan's relationships with his parents and all these reptilian aliens--this stuff is all fresh and exciting.  Running away to the alien circus is also kind of interesting, but not something we haven't experienced before.  Space pirates is even less novel.  And a decadent Earth doesn't feel fresh or exciting at all, and on Terra Roan doesn't have the affecting relationships he had earlier--Raff and Bella in the pterodactyl-people ghetto, and Roan's first dancing lover and his giant metallic friend among the carnies, are a lot more memorable than the Terran dancer and the talking dog.  Think of how King Kong, Dorothy Gale, and Luke Skywalker, the heroes of your favorite movies, get into increasingly crazier adventures in increasingly bizarre locales as their stories progress--poor Roan's career moves in the opposite direction, each segment of his novel being more and more of a SF cliche.

Still, a pretty good novel.