Postmarked the Stars

I spent an entertaining hour or so re-reading this oldie - probably first read it in the 70's. It has all the standard equipment for vintage SF - the weapons are blasters, stunners, or tanglers, the craft are flitters, crawlers, or spacers. Unspecified "radiation" causes all sorts of weird effects. There's a rough planet which is just being colonized, therefore able to hold some surprises for the settlers and for the hard-working crew of a small space freighter. For the genre, it's well done...but it really wouldn't be too hard to rewrite this as the story of the crew of a small tramp steamer reaching an outpost on some wild and unexplored coast, in about 1900 or so: their adventures would be spiced by a touch of "The Lost World", with prehistoric monsters being bred for purposes of dominance by an evil international group acting under cover of research. The only thing that's really unique, to mark this as SF, is the charming invention of the "brachs" - cuddly animals that (due to "radiation" again) acquire unusual intelligence and language, translated to human speech by a translator gadget. Wonder if Andre Norton, who died on 2005, saw any cellphones with their built-in language phrase-books? (Though they are not as capable as her "translator.") Following review links from this I came across "Dread Companion" which sounds to have more punch...will get it, I think.

This is a good read book 4 in the Solar Queen series. Book 1 is Sargosso of Space. Book 2 is Plague Ship. Book 3 is Vodoo Planet. If you like the series you will find it along those lines.