Half Past Human

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Thomas J. Bassler (1932–2011) was a medical doctor, who for too few years wrote science fiction as T.J. Bass. This book and its sequel, The Godwhale (1974) are the main part of his legacy. In them the conflict between humanity and nature—including humanity’s own nature—is pushed to its limit.

Nature was big in the sixties. So was population, whose growth seemed all the more pressing in cities crowded at the core and sprawling at the edge. Wartime destruction and post-war reconstruction had created in the advanced countries a new landscape of motorway, freeway and high-rise, of suburbia and supermarket. Above it hung a haze of pollutants, and the permanent threat of nuclear attack; beyond it, in what was then called the Third World, growing numbers of undernourished, dark-skinned people poured into slums and shanty towns or slipped silently into the shadows to swell the ranks of nationalist and communist insurgencies.

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