Take Back Plenty

Colin Greenland's "Take Back Plenty" is an old-fashioned space adventure of a kind I don't run into very often. It's clever, smoothly written, endlessly inventive and entertaining. Our heroine is Tabitha Jute, a tough space pilot whose ship is constantly on the verge of falling apart. She hires herself out to an eccentric band -- a con artist, a sapient parrot, a pair of identical twin gymnasts, and a super-intelligent cyborg -- and tries to stay out of trouble while making enough cash to fix her ship. Aliens known as Capellans, leaders of an interstellar empire of lesser races, have arrived in the Solar System and gifted humanity with the technology to let it travel between planets. They also control that technology, and won't let anyone out of the system, and they run human affairs with bureaucracy and massive starships. This puts the human race -- and our heroes -- in the position of the underdog, which is the best place to be for this sort of story. There are so many pulpy science fiction tales on the market that it would be easy to glance at the cover of "Take Back Plenty" -- admittedly not a very good cover -- and dismiss it as generic space opera. But even if it isn't a serious novel with a heavy message (something like 1984, Childhood's End, or Canticle for Leibowitz), it's actually a much rarer sort of book: an intelligent piece of entertainment that never stops. Tabitha is a great character, a strong, confident woman who is effortlessly sympathetic; the various aliens are not the most unique, but they're rendered very well; the book is packed with humor, action, sex, and style to lift it above the standard competition. Out of print in the USA, but used copies can be found; it won two awards in the UK, which were richly deserved.

I always run the risk of a backlash every time I say something like, "This was fun, but it won't change your life" because that's when I meet the person to whom this is the finest piece of literature of all time. That said, I stand by my statement and chances are it won't be contested any time soon. I do find it odd that I'm only the second comment, with the first one being from sometime in the last century. I didn't think the book was that obscure, but what do I know. I don't know what else Colin Greenland has written but this is the novel that is generally mentioned most often and it really is an entertaining slice of prototypical SF, definitely in the Heinlein mode with a lot of the contraversial edges sandpapered off. The story concerns an adventure in the life of Tabitha Jute, the captain of a cargo ship, a lady in the mold of the SF hero, as she's full of what we used to call "pluck", a sassy, no-nonsense woman that is nearly fearless, never short of ideas on how to get out of a situation, someone that doesn't need a man to complete her life but isn't adverse to taking one to bed if he strikes her fancy. However, she's also sensitive and slightly vulnerable and certainly not one of those boring square-jawed Buck Rogers types that populate so many other SF novels. Your mileage may vary on how much of this you see as breaking cliches or simply creating new ones, but Greenland makes her three-dimensional enough so that she's by turns knowledeable and frightened, out of her element and in total control, depending on how things go. And they do. Taken in by a pretty face, she takes a job for what she thinks is travelling group of local performers, basically just agreeing to shuttle them from one place to another (she doesn't want to, but her ship desperately needs repairs). It turns out that the group is a real bunch of weirdos, they may not be what they say they are, and even when they say what they are, that might not be true either. The plot progresses at a maddening pace, only stopping to catch its breath during interludes where Tabitha talks to the ship and tells it stories about past adventures, which are actually pretty interesting and many of them are designed to set up plot twists that occur later in the book, plus showcase Tabitha's take-no-crap personality. The plot does have an element of "this happened and then this happened and then this happened and then . . ." which is to say that it's rather linear, although Greenland does keep the surprises coming, mostly through revelations and shifts in plot because of those revelations. Where the book really shines is the setting, Greenland sets up a universe where the solar system has been sealed off for apparently arbitrary reasons by a race of powerful beings called the Capellans, who seem to exist purely to annoy other intelligent races. This is where the planet Plenty comes in (it's not as predominant as the title or the description on the back of the book would have you be

A few days in the life of a space faring, lady truck driver with an over-active libido whose luck turns from bad to worse. I suppose its fair to say that a fast pace and confusion often go together. This book does a decent job of balancing the two. The main character is a tad schizo in that she is both the prototypical assertive modern woman and a pushover for a pretty face. Neat aliens (I liked the cherubs the most) and some of the most explicit sex that I've ever read in a sci-fi. Not a classic IMHO by any means, but an entertaining read. If you're running low on ideas for new material to read and aren't looking for spiritual enlightenment, give it shot.