My brother is the only guy I know who truly enjoys reading old science-fiction novels. You’ll never catch him with anything more modern than the 1980s, but the pre-moon era—when space was still a mystery and oxygen-filled planets peopled by aliens were still a real possibility—well, that’s his honest favorite. His passion keeps me on the lookout for books that fit the bill, and I try to keep him in steady supply.

I found this one in another Little Free Library (where I get a lot of my books, if not quite half), but was drawn to it myself mostly because I found it also available on Librivox. Being able to listen to someone reading the book at a higher speed while I followed along in my hardcover made it a relatively quick read—though not an especially entertaining one.

The premise of the book is sound. This planet Fenris circles its sun in just four days, giving it a four-day year (hence the book’s title). The only problem is, the planet rotates at such a slow speed that each day is 2000 hours long (83.3 earth days) with about 1000 hours of blazing daytime and 1000 hours of frigid night, 100 hours of which link the two together on either end with sunrises and sunsets of bearable climate. The planet’s human occupants are toughies, living most of their lives underground, where politics, greed, and sabotage are their main pastimes—along with reading.

The story follows a travel writer named Walt, newly arrived on Fenris on a writing assignment that apparently no one else wanted. While here, he experiences the planet firsthand and slowly gets bogged down in its bureaucracy and the Hunters’ Cooperative, discovering that the people are being cheated out of their just desserts. Revolution is imminent.

Author H. Beam Piper does his darndest to make this planet scientifically explicable, and I’ve got to give him credit. 1961 was not the year for harvesting facts about outer space that made it sound even moderately livable, but he puts his heart and brain into the attempt to convince us, it most certainly is! And upon this planet where the surface is habitable only for those 100 hours at daybreak, there is a semi-thriving business of sea-monster hunting from whose carcasses they harvest the planet’s only commodity of tallow wax. This is Fenris’ only export, the basis of their economy and the cause of all their woes. Walt finds himself in the thick of things. Throw in some meatgrinders and tread snails to boot, and you’ve got yourself here a political sci-fi yarn that’s destined possibly to entertain you, but probably to bore you.

People will disagree with my sentiments, of course. I’ve picked up Frank Herbert’s Dune multiple times and just can’t possibly enjoy it—the geopolitics of the 1970s and ’80s overlaid onto an alien landscape with characters I can’t relate to. It’s laborious, not only because of the book’s size, but also because of the author’s agenda. The Four Day Planet is much shorter but also appears to have an agenda (labor unions perhaps?). It’s just not my thing, though who knows—it might very well be yours!

Piper’s a good writer and his imagination certainly took him to places few of us could conjure. I’m sure he’s got a band of loyal followers. One line I love was Walt’s closing remarks in the final chapter about “story” and why he was allowed to write “The End” to this, a tale that’s still got a number of loose ends. As he heads off-planet to another assignment, he writes:

Bisch says, “Stories never end, ever.” He’s wrong. Stories die, and nothing in the world is deader than a dead news story. But before they do, they hatch a flock of little ones, and some of them grow into bigger stories still. 

It’s a wonderful way to look this or any novel. It’s why fan fiction exists and why you sometimes leave a book or film wishing there was still more. I suppose I felt that way about this book, because it was a great premise that took a trajectory I didn’t like. I wonder what other things might have happened on Fenris that Walt wasn’t there to see…

©2024 E.T.