2009 books
29) Robert Randall (Robert Silverberg & Randall Garrett), The Shrouded Planet, 1957
30) Robert Randall (Robert Silverberg & Randall Garrett), The Dawning Light, 1959
I picked up these Gnome Press first editions for very little money when London's famous Murder One bookshop closed in 2005. This diptych from Silverberg and Garrett was first pitched as a series of linked short stories to Astounding editor John Campbell in a way that he couldn't refuse, and he didn't. It's the story of a far future human mission to the planet Nidor, where the peaceful Nidorians - so humanoid that they'd fit comfortably inside a single Star Trek episode (probably more TNG than TOS) - find that their stagnant culture and sun-worshipping worldwide religion is ill-equipped to deal with the coming of the Earthmen and their ideas of scientific progress: the humans basically interfere in the alien culture with calculated intent. The Shrouded Planet's initial three short stories with linking chapters cover four generations of Nidorians from first contact to nearly a century later, and the most notable thing about the entire story arc is that its told entirely from the aliens' viewpoint, although there's very little that is essentially alien about them. The first two stories are so comfortably easy-going and uninteresting they bored me, and only the third story possesses any real tension as the humans inexplicably indulge in blatant sabotage of the Nidorians' agrarian economy, though their reasons are kept concealed until the close of The Dawning Light. The first novel had a lukewarm reception when first published and it's not hard to see why, however The Dawning Light fared much better, and even though it has the same leisurely style it also contains more tension and is more convincingly told. That being said, I don't believe these novels would win much praise today, their pace is altogether way too slow and there's little strangeness or sophistication to be found in either book. It's tempting to speculate on how the novels were divided between the two writers and what factors each brought to the story, but without that knowledge I read them with the feeling that the more measured Garrett was a restraint on the younger and more free-thinking Silverberg. I wonder how true that is.