John Boyd is back to delight readers of his superb first novel, The Last Starship from Earth. Robert A. Heinlein wrote of it: This is the best anti-Utopia, the strongest satire on trends in our present culture, I have seen since ‘1984’ appeared. I enjoyed its humor, its half-buried allusions. The puns, the almost-not-quite-quotations, the thinly-veiled references to our ‘real’ world – all of these delighted me. It belongs up at the top, along with ‘Brave New World’ and ‘1984’.

Dr. Freda Caron, blond and beautiful, had waited in vain for her fiance to disembark from Project Abie’s recently returned starship. But Paul had unaccountably requested an extended tour of duty on The Planet of Flowers and, in his stead, he had sent an assistant, Hal Polino, with a verbal message and an exquisitely iridescent yellow tulip that not only had a plastic memory–but could talk! Freda soon realized she must unlock the secrets of the flower planet, and its strange hold on Paul, through Hal. Hal’s lack of methodology and unscientific irreverence constantly confuse Freda, and they battle one another, the ultra-rational world-of-tomorrow they inhabit, and, ultimately, the strange, sentient, unearthly flower planet Freda journeys to explore. The climax of this shocking and oddly beautiful novel is bizarre and delightful.

Another admirer of John Boyd’s debut novel was Arthur C. Clarke, who wrote: A fascinating novel that kept me amused and interested to the end. The future society it describes is one of the most convincing I’ve ever encountered.