For years I have meant to read novels by Piers Anthony. I just did and I'm wondering why I waited so long. While Race is written for youth it has messages for adults as well.The story is told by young John Smith, a white American boy becoming a man who is living in a small town supposedly located in Nebraska. Several inconsistencies have begun to trouble him. There is the peeling color of the skin of many of the inhabitants of Newton. Why cannot John go beyond certain environmental limits outside of Newton? Who is the young woman to whom he is supposedly to marry and is she real? As he questions his life in Newton he begins to explore to discover the answers for himself. The answers will surprise the reader as well as investigate environmental change and destruction which is interesting from the perspective of the time in which this novel was written - 1973.What John discovers is unsettling to him. It seems that small villages are created to hold pure white Americans, Chinese, Arabs and Africans on a second world. Are all the purebreds trapped or imprisoned part of a zoo or observation experiment? His adventures are just beginning as he finds himself banded with other young people who are searching for the truth. Read this novel and discover the answers that John and his friends found. I assure you that the ending will surprise you.
I always like a Piers Anthony read. As with most of his science fiction, the themes are a little "in your face." This one is a "society encounters monumental damage and decay...... racial discord.... preservation of race" kind of theme. John is living in an American town in the 1960's, and is set up to marry a girl named Betsy that he hasn't met. He starts to suspect something odd is going on for many reasons, one of which is that his skin color is real. Those people in his town paint on skin color. A majority of the book is John's escapades with other "purebreds" he meets by accident. In the end, as his group flees to earth, he discovers the fate of his civilization, which explains a number of the things in his hometown.
Piers Anthony is a good story teller, and this book provides a decent yarn. However, one of his not uncommon failings is to use a good story to promote an ideological perspective (see also "Bio of a Space Tyrant"). That is the case in this novel. I think however that he missed his own point in this book: the author rather explicitly states his theme to be the importance of racial diversity for human development while the lessons drawn from the story would point more to the importance of cultural diversity. Overall, a mediocre book that was meant to make a point, but missed.
—TheIron Paw
SF-John Smith is growing up as the all American boy in the 1960s except that little things don't match the way they are supposed to be, such as his dog with extendable claws and the ability to climb trees. His parents have him write letters to a girl he never met but was told he will marry. The two develop a rather obvious yet never broken code and John goes exploring (which is never discovered) and learns that he is really in a zoo in the future. When his bride-to-be is supposed to arrive there is a mix up and an Arab girl arrives instead. It seems that several young people are the last "purebreeds" of their races. This is a very race-centric book although done without prejudice, the reader cannot help but think such a book would have trouble being printed today instead of 1973. And the ending negates everything that happened previously.
—Samuel Lubell
Since now everyone is Standard, a mixture of all races, there are few purebreds remaining. They live in zoos as exhibits, and they are expecting to mate to have more purebred children. John and the other purebreds want to break out, but they have to come up with a good plan.Although I have read other books with similar concepts, I still thoroughly enjoyed it.
—Julie S.
