Mixing Moby Dick Together with an Alien Planet, a Civil War and a Detective Story

 

Published in 1961, H. Beam Piper's short novel Four-Day Planet manages to combine several different genres and themes into one smoothly-told adventure story.

The person telling the story is 17-year-old Walt Boyd, who lives on the planet Fenris. The small population of Fenris live in an underground city, as the planet's slow rotation means the surface is deathly hot for several hundred hours and then deathly cold for several hundred hours.

The economy on Fenris depends on tallow-wax, which is recovered from the bodies of sea monsters hunted by the humans. Tallow-wax is made of very large molecules, which make it a perfect light-weight substance to protect against radiation and other dangers in space. It's therefore worth a lot of money.

But it is currently only selling for pennies a pound. Why? Well, it seems that the head of the Hunter's Cooperative is cheating the hunters, but also manages to fix elections so that he can't be voted out. On top of this, he has the small police force in his pocket.

Walt is the perfect person to follow along with events on Fenris. His father owns the only newspaper and Walt is the only reporter. So he tends to be on hand whenever something important happens. Since Walt is observant, smart and willing to help when he can, he makes an identifiable and likeable protagonist. 

And important stuff is indeed happening on Fenris. This includes the arrival of a representative from a company that wants to buy the wax at a fair price. This puts a target on the guy's back, with thugs working for the Hunter's Coop willing to pull the trigger on him. 

To avoid trouble, Walt and the rep go on a monster-hunting trip, which are carried out by crews aboard vessels that are combinations of submarines and aircarft. But Walt's trip ends when the vessel he is aboard is sabotaged.

My favorite part of the book is the few chapters in which the crew of that ship has to figure out how to survive, first aboard an enclosed boat with limited oxygen and no working radio. Later, they reach shore, but have to figure out how to survive in subzero temperatures. Sometimes, in fiction as in real life, it's nice to be surrounded by professionals. The crew share ideas while improvising and making use of available resources.

The sabotage sets events in motion back in the city, driving the various factions there towards open warfare.

So Four-Day Planet combines a "whale" hunt story with a survival story, a tale of possible civil war, and a crime story into an effective and very entertaining science fiction adventure. There's also a character in the form of the town drunk who (it is soon apparent) is more than what he appears to be on the surface, leading to a great plot twist at the end.

The novel is in the public domain now, so a free e-copy can be found HERE.