PLANET CALLED TREASON

A half-baked parody of fantasy/sci-fi formulas. Treason, furnished with a couple of moons called Freedom and Dissent and split up into such principalities as Jones, Wong, Lardner, and Mancowicz, has terrain to suit any kind of yarn—cliffs, deserts, forests of giant trees, you name it. The inhabitants—descendants of a shipload of exiles, each of whom went off to pursue his own branch of knowledge in his own territory—are equally diverse; each kingdom has perfected a skill like subjective time-slowing or regeneration of missing parts, and is busy trying to persuade the galactic bureaucracy that it alone deserves to be released from the isolation to which the planet is doomed by the absence of metal ores. The hero, Lanik Mueller of Mueller, parts-regenerator par excellence, spends the first half of the book growing unwanted new arms and breasts until "cured" of his gift by the wise and peaceful dune-dwellers of Schwartz. Thereafter the plot sidles into a half-serious vein, with an attempt to unmask a planet-wide series of dynastic duperies. A few sunny lines, but basically a mess.