To save their child, Tinker and Mu Ren must escape the hive, and join the savage wild humans who live on the surface and steal from the world garden. Once there, they encounter a host of curious characters: the ancient human Moon and his equally antique dog Dan, the spear-shaped robot Toothpick, a liberated mechanical harvester, the wild human shaman with his cybernetic Ball, Moses the escaped hive pipe-master, and Nebish Val the human-hunter.
Bass gives us a chilling view of the future of humans under the foot of the Big ES, but also offers hope. Olga is coming, and her purpose is to save the five-toed humans from the Big ES. But what shape will that salvation take?
This is a classic novel that ought to be in every thinking reader's library, and studied with Burgess and Orwell, Huxley and Harrison. If you've read it once, it's time to read it again.
Thomas J. Bassler was a physician, and this shows in his language. Wonderful words—edentulous, melanocytes, luteal, acromegalic—are richly scattered like crunchy nuts in a chewy brownie, but they don't mask the action and allure of the story. It's not an arrowhead, it's a "levallois point;" he's not a skinny man, he's an "ectomorph." As a child I thrilled at learning such luscious terminology, because Bass made it effortless to understand his argot.
Article comments
1 - SFC SKI
Sociological function is always the most interesting aspect oof an SF novel for me.
2 - Christopher Connors
T. J. Bass is one of the great sci fi writers ever, even though he only wrote two books! The God Whale is a masterpiece and is alive with fantastic and realistic images of a fantasy nature. The advancement of medcine in the future to the state that Bass views, is quite incredible, but logical. Why not indeed be able to replace the lower legs with a robot body! It is already being done with arms and hands!