Alien Art / Arcturus Landing

by Gordon R. Dickson

ALIEN ART — On the planet Arcadia, a young man and woman and a swamp otter join together to haul the otter's eleven hundred pound statue overland to meet the deadline of a prospective buyer from another planet. Arcturus The Aliens claim humans can enter the galaxy when and if they develop their own faster-than light drive, but they also stop all research. When an Alien orders Malcolm Fletcher to drop his research, Fletcher joins an eccentric millionaire in a race to develop a stardrive in secret.

Genres: Science Fiction

352 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published May 1, 1982

About the author

Gordon Rupert Dickson was an American science fiction author. He was born in Canada, then moved to Minneapolis, Minnesota as a teenager. He is probably most famous for his Childe Cycle and the Dragon Knight series. He won three Hugo awards and one Nebula award.

Reviews

[Tom B · Rating 2 out of 5]

Alien Art
A story about two locals, a city girl and a woodsman, aged 19 and 21, on a colony world. They're on a mission to transport a piece of art made by an otter-like creature, native to that world. The otter joins them too. They run into all sorts of trouble until they finally reach their destination. There is some strong anti-colonial messaging here, something I can get behind, but I don't buy how almost every resident is swayed to vote against something they supposedly strongly believed in until they laid eyes on a statue. Also, there are redundant passages that go into painful length describing how rafts and litters are made.

Arcturus Landing
This is better than the first one. A scientist who works on an FTL drive is told by his employer (The Company) to stop and start over. The son of this employer exposes this company to be in league with the aliens who have imposed restrictions on human kind with regard to space travel. Alien tech is distributed by this Company to placate the people. There’s an abundance of everything, and no one needs to work. The scientists and sidekicks meet a squirrel-like alien who helps them escape to Venus where they meet a resistance organization. There, the scientist develops his device and they travel to meet the Federation of aliens on Arcturus to show that human kind has reached the required level of technology to be admitted as a respected member of this club.

It’s an entertaining story with reasonably interesting characters. The alien Peep is amusing, and the back story of a quarantine of the human race is compelling. However, overall, the narrative is a bit simplistic, and the ending is too abrupt.

[Jon · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dirk was frowning, and Margie looked upset. "I just like Peep so well the way I thought he was!" she said.
"It's never pleasant to discover a supposed inferior was really a superior," said Waring, perhaps a trifle sententiously.