The Green Forest

Read/Watch 'em In Order #113

A.E. Van Vogt's 1959 fix-up novel The War Against the Rull took six stories written mostly in the 1940s and tied them together with a few bridging chapters. Though I'm a fan of Van Vogt, I never happened to have read them. So it was only when I began reviewing these stories as they originally appeared in the pulps that I discovered he had re-written a number of them to place them in the same continuity and make them work as a novel.

The first story introduced us to the character of Professor Jamieson and to the aggressive and dangerous alien race known as the Rull. The second story was orginally not a part of this continuity, but was re-written for the novel to involve both Jamieson and the Rull. 

The third story was set in the Rull-verse, but was also changed in the novel, this time to keep Jamieson around as the protagonist.

That brings us to story #4--"The Green Forest," which was published in the June 1949 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. Here we have another case in which the tale was not originally set in the Rull-verse.

There is still an alien race at war with humanity in the story. These are the Yevd, shape-changers who often replace humans to sabotage mankind's efforts to fight them. In fact, the protagonist this time is Marenson, a government official who is organizing a effort to acquire "lymph juice," something that can be used against the Yevd. To get the juice, though, involves setting up a base on another planet and harvesting it from the highly dangerous lymph beast.

When Marenson is kidnapped and taken to this planet himself, he at first thinks it might be part of a dispute he had been having with the man hired to run the base. But he soon finds out that the Yevd are involved. In fact, one of them has replaced him on Earth and even gone on vacation with his wife. The Yevd are confident their operative can fool the wife--after all, humans who have been married for years usually aren't physically demonstrative anymore.

The Yevd have a multi-layered plan to disrupt the harvesting of lymph juice. This plan eventually involves Marenson being stranded in the alien jungle, about to be eaten by the lymph beasts.

But Marenson knows a thing or two about the beasts that the beasts that might allow him to turn the tables on his captors. And as for fooling his wife back on Earth--well, perhaps the Yevd should have found out what the purpose of the vacation was before assuming they could pull off that substitution.

Van Vogt had a knack for clever plots and clever plot twists. We definitely see that knack at work in "The Green Forest," though I think the story does seem unfocused for the first few pages. 

For the book, Professor Jamieson replaced Marenson and the Rull become involved in it all. You can read the original version, though, HERE.