Half Past Human

Bass's vision is unique, his imagination brilliant and energetic with an eye for coherent yet constantly surprising detail. A great achievement. It's too bad Bass only wrote this and one other book.

Half-past human is a wild futuristic novel about overpopulation and its impact on the human race. It brings us to a time when technology has advanced to a bio-techno-automated society ran by the dictates of an artificial-intelligence led council. Reproduction is controlled by the council. Man lives in hives,while all available land is cultivated by vast agro auto-matons into vast vegtable gardens. It is into these forbidden gardens that genetic throwbacks with the original non hybredized blood strain, venture to live freely,tribally and with Nature in a way the hive people are physically unable to. They are hunted by the hive and find a way to escape the society that desires their destruction. The book explore different facets of life,inside and outside of the hive. I have read this book over and over and I never cease to be thrilled by this awe-raising pshyche-eco futuristic scifi thriller.

Half Past Human and The Godwhale are the sum total of Thomas J. Bassler's SF output, but even after 20 years, they remain two brilliant points of light, pointing to what should have been a long and brilliant career. I would love to see him come back and take up fiction again- these books rival Cordwainer Smith and Jack Vance in the richness of the world they create. If you read this book years ago, pick it up and read it again. The Nebbishes and their flavored calories are images that will stay with you for a lifetime.

For all its dark depiction of a future crammed with hundreds of billions of Nebbishes and a few humans, I was moved most by what it said of the here and now. Those of us who can still think find ourselves surrounded by mindless sub-units of the State and wonder how bad it will get. This is one vision of that. It tells a similar story to The Matrix in a completely different way.

Half Past Human is an intriguing tale of a dark future of overpopulation. The population of the earth stands in the trillions, with most people living underground in gigantic hive cities. The people are genetically engineered to be small, docile and weak, dependant on their cities and immune to the psychological effects of overcrowding. The entire surface of the earth is given over to food production, shortening the food chain to its barest minimum. A few "wild" humans live on the surface, foraging for food in the gardens and hunted as vermin.In the face of all this, the citizens of the hive cities manage to retain some spark of that which makes them human.This is a book well worth the trouble to find.