I wasn't terribly happy with this book. I listened to it on a trip a couple years ago using the Librivox reading, and quit two-thirds the way through. I picked the hard-copy up to finish it recently, and found the finish to be as unimpressive as I expected. To start with, why yes, of course the cat people love catnip. More importantly, given the non-dystopic future, when the plague ship of the title shows up, the government would have devoted resources to at least convince its occupants that they will get medical help of some sort, and they don't need to panic and start doing stupid things. This government, on the other hand, would rather let them die, so surprise, surprise, the occupants of the ship panic and start doing stupid things to stay alive. And they continue to do stupid and grossly illegal things until they succeed in escaping their dilemma, at which point the government, instead of punishing them for major felonies including armed kidnapping, basically gives them a slap on the wrist and sends them on their next adventure. Perhaps I was demanding more of realism than I should have, but it was social realism, not scientific realism, that I was demanding. ( )

Plague Ship by Andre Norton (Alice Mary Norton) is one of the 130 novels the author wrote, so we may be able to excuse an opening sentence as dreadful as the one above. Maybe she was having an off day. Plague Ship is pulp, as one can tell from the cover, and probably not very good pulp at that. It's a rather mundane story, frankly. A ship full of traders travel to a newly discovered planet, exchange goods with the cat-like natives who live there, and head home only to discover they have picked up a strange virus which makes them officially a plague ship, unable to land on earth (Terra) or any other planet inhabited by humans.

But it's in the book's mundane aspects that one can find something fairly interesting. Take away the rockets and the aliens and Plague Ship becomes a novel about business, about work. Not a glamorous, soap opera kind of story full of beautiful, backstabbing women, but a story about how business deals are actually transacted; the negotiations, the problems with delivery, the interpersonal struggles to please all of the parties involved, the squabbles with the competition. Real everyday life buried inside a piece of interplanetary pulp fiction.

Book critic Maureen Corrigan has written about the overall disappearance of work in modern fiction. There was a time when books about work were commonplace. Horatio Alger stories come immediately to mind, but descriptions of people trying to be successful in the workplace, trying to do their jobs well, used to be a regular feature in all sorts of fiction. Even a novel about psychological breakdown like Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar (1963) has long sections about how to become successful at work, in Ms. Plath's case as a magazine writer. Ms. Corrigan believes that the last bastion of work in modern fiction is the detective story. Detective novels are about work above all. They may feature exciting scenes and exotic characters, but the main focus of the novel is how the detective does the job. It surprised me to discover that this is basically what science fiction, especially 1950's pulp science fiction is about. How will business men go about their business in the future, when we can travel to and trade with distant planets? Plague Ship provides one possible answer.

Is it an undiscovered gem? Not in my view. But it does provide a window on the past which may be strange for a novel about the future. By projecting the concerns and interests of her contemporary readers on the question of what their futures may be like, Ms. Norton gives us a glimpse into the psyche of her own time. ( )

Traders! I enjoy this sub-genre (trading goods, being kind of explorers and sociologists and money-grubbers at once). This is second in a series, and now I've got to go find the rest. Solid fun, some social learnin' that isn't heavy-handed. See what happens when you let 'em have the first one free? They get hooked. It kind of weirds me out that there is a Jellico in this series, as there is a Jellico in one of David Drake's Hammer's Slammers books. ( )

The second of the adventures of scruffy young merchant traveller Dane Thorsen. An expedition to another planet is also anything but routine, as the locals are hard to deal with, and the consequences of leaving, are worse.

Aliens and other problems lead the outside to believe that their ship is a disease carrier. This is not good as it might mean destruction.

http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/16921

http://freesf.blogspot.com/2007/01/pl... ( )