Conehead

by Gardner Francis Fox

Fleet Commander Alden Slater came to Gothon to recuperate and found himself on the side of a minority . in a full-scale civil rights battle. All he did was come to the defense of a pretty girl named Aldatha Te - who happened to be a colly. And collys, the original human settlers of Gothon and worshipers of a god called Dromm, had always been treated as slaves by the Terran representatives. Slater learned, soon enough, that he was making powerful enemies in the monolithic Interplanetary Development Corp. who "ruled" Gothon, and wanted lands that the collys held sacred to Dromm. But he couldn't understand why so much fuss was being made - until he discovered that more than racial prejudice was involved, and Dromm was more than a myth.

Genres: Science Fiction

224 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1973

About the author

Gardner Francis Cooper Fox was an American writer known best for creating numerous comic book characters for DC Comics. Comic book historians estimate that he wrote more than 4,000 comics stories, including 1,500 for DC Comics.
Fox is known as the co-creator of DC Comics heroes the Flash, Hawkman, Doctor Fate and the original Sandman, and was the writer who first teamed those and other heroes as the Justice Society of America. Fox introduced the concept of the Multiverse to DC Comics in the 1961 story "Flash of Two Worlds!"

Pseudonyms: Gardner F. Fox, Jefferson Cooper, Bart Sommers, Paul Dean, Ray Gardner, Lynna Cooper, Rod Gray, Larry Dean, Robert Starr, Don Blake, Ed Blake, Warner Blake, Michael Blake, Tex Blane, Willis Blane, Ed Carlisle, Edgar Weston, Tex Slade, Eddie Duane, Simon Majors, James Kendricks, Troy Conway, Kevin Matthews, Glen Chase

Reviews

[Craig · Rating 3 out of 5]

Gardner Fox will forever be remembered for his work in comics (he is credited as the co-creator of Hawkman, Hawkgirl, Batgirl, Zatanna, Sandman, the J.S.A and the J.L.A., etc.), but he was a very prolific storyteller who worked under a vast variety of pseudonyms and wrote a lot of swords & sorcery novels (Kothar and Kyrik), pornographic novels (the Lady from L.U.S.T., believe it or not), as well as science fiction. Conehead was published in 1973 and is an early allegorical look at the terrible way Europeans treated people unlike themselves in any way, particularly Indigenous Americans. It's kind of heavy-handed, but the message was bright and heartfelt. It has a nice romantic twist, too. I wonder if the title or the J.H. Breslow cover helped inspire the Saturday Night Sketches in 1977?

[Genna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hey! This was pretty good! A remarkably un-racist book for its time. It brought up (tangentially) how horrible Native peoples have been treated by using the coneheads (originally humans, and still humans, but who have evolved to fit the environment of a planet they colonized hundreds of years before, now being discriminated against, forced into slums, and slowly exterminated through poverty and hunger while their sacred lands are being threatened by mining) as a placeholder. Granted, there's the whole white-savior trope, where the off-worlder comes in and saves everybody but it was... dare I say it? Refreshing. Also refreshing was that the hero was a lawyer and saves everybody by being a lawyer. I'm not as concerned about the negative depiction of lawyers, but it was something different from the usual swashbuckling hero of science fiction (though he was that too) so that was also refreshing.

Treatment of women was meh, also the sort of thing you'd expect from the time period. The heroine is the usual sort, independent and empowered, but only to a point that makes her interesting to Hero Lawyer and then she is simpering and helpless. There was a really weird bit where he gets angry with her because he... I don't quite remember... he complimented her looks and then imagines that she's going to get angry with him, like she's done so many times before, but she's literally NEVER gotten angry with him before, if you discount, perhaps, the first time they met.

Still, a fun read, and extra star for trying to talk through issues of race.

[Ruz El · Rating 1 out of 5]

Abandoned! Two chapters in, and this became torture to read. A terrible Sci Fi about racism in the future, it was so heavy handed and obvious that when the dude quoted Martin Luther King Jr., "a man who lived 3000 years ago on earth", I was ready to dump it out the bus window onto the Whitemud. Avoid!

[Jeff Wyonch · Rating 2 out of 5]

A fairly bad book. The plot, native settlers resisting colonial incursion, is popular in sci-fi and has been done much better by authors. Fox's explosive output (he supposedly wrote more than 300 novels prior to his death) probably contributes to the blandness of this book...it feels like a first draft.