REVIEW: Treasure Planet

Treasure Planet - Hal Colebatch and Jessica Q. Fox

From the Amazon page:

A thrilling stand-alone novel addition to the long-running, popular Man-Kzin Wars series created by New York Times multiple best seller, Larry Niven.

“Ah, the wealth o’ the treasure planet be beyond the dreams of Man or the hopes o’ Kzin!”

On Wunderland, a generation after Liberation, memories of the bloody kzin conquest and Occupation have faded, and men and kzin live largely in peace. But the fabulous treasure of the kzin pirates, hidden on a distant world, remains a magnet for freebooters. Young Peter Cartwright and his kzinrett friend Marthar receive information and map from a most unlikely source and soon themselves fighting the most ruthless pirates in Known Space for an unimaginable prize.

Treasure Planet by Hal Colebatch and Jessica Q. Fox is a novel set in Larry Niven’s universe of the Man-Kzin Wars. I will say right now that I am unfamiliar with this series as a whole, and this is the first book in the series that I have ever read. Please keep that in mind as you read my thoughts here.

There be Spoilers in these here waters!

Treasure Planet starts us off with an introduction to our protagonist and narrator, Peter Cartwright, a young human boy living on the planet of Wunderland. Peter is a scrappy and intelligent young man, as we soon learn, and he is quick to tell us facts about the universe he lives in and all manner of information about space travel and various sciences.  To say that he’s a deep well of knowledge would be an understatement. Throughout the story, Peter gives us miniature lectures on several forms of mathematics, biology, philosophy, and education with more certainty than most high school valedictorians. He then takes frequent opportunities to tell us that, compared to his friend Marthar, he’s a complete dimwit.

Marthar is Peter’s best friend and a high-ranking member of the tiger-like race known as Kzin. She’s much larger and far stronger than Peter, and quite a bit smarter too, but they seem to be of the same age group. She often helps Peter with their schoolwork and, with as smart as she proves to be, I can’t imagine Peter gets anything less than perfect scores. Like Peter, she often points out facts about many things we encounter in this universe and also takes any opportunity she can to explain the science behind nearly everything they encounter. She’s also quick to give her input on whether or not she believes humans’ ways of doing things make any logical sense. Frequently, after doing this, Marthar calls Peter her ‘little monkey’, which she means as a sweet pet name of sorts, but we learn later is often an insult from Kzin to humans.

On the subject of Kzin, we learn a ton about them in this book, from the weapons they like to use to the words they have for their young. The information is presented in such a way that even a newcomer like me eventually didn’t miss a beat upon seeing words like wtsai (a favored Kzin weapon) and kzinrett (a female Kzin). To put it simply, the battle-hungry Kzin invaded and almost overtook the human race entirely, fighting many bloody battles and showing no mercy to their foes. However, the humans managed to overcome the lopsided odds and fought back bravely, eventually resulting in an end to the fighting and an uneasy peace between the two races. There’s a lot of prejudice and hatred on both sides, as we often see, but Peter and Marthar’s friendship remains a strong example of the ideal peace they strive for.

Also, no, I have NO idea how ‘Kzin’ (or any of the similar terms) is supposed to be pronounced. I’ve mostly been saying it ‘Zin’ and treating it like words such as ‘knowledge’, ‘knight’, and ‘knuckles’.

The main plot line of the story centers around Peter and Marthar coming across information from an old Kzin pirate about a fabled ‘Treasure Planet’, a planet filled with riches from an ancient alien civilization. Marthar’s father heads an expedition to travel to this planet by means of spaceship, taking along a rough and tumble crew made mainly of Kzin. Peter comes along as Marthar’s friend and essentially a cabin boy on the ship, though the two are given equal freedom to move about the ship. They also are both required to take lessons from their new teacher, an old one-legged Kzin by the name of Silver. He’s an intelligent and seemingly friendly fellow who quickly gains the trust of everybody around him and even saves Peter’s life. This makes it all the more shocking when Peter happens upon Silver and a large number of the crew planning a mutiny so that they can take all the booty from the treasure planet for themselves!

Is this starting to sound familiar to anybody?

It was at this point in the story that I started putting some things together: Treasure Planet, Pirates, the story focusing on a young boy, a ship voyage, a mutinous member of the crew named Silver, a dedication to Robert Louis Stevenson at the beginning of the book…

Clearly this book was based upon the hit Disney movie: Treasure Planet!

Yeah, not quite. This book is heavily inspired by Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic book Treasure Island. It has many similar plot points and recalls a number of ‘moments’ that made that book a classic adventure story. My first thought was offense that Treasure Island was clearly being copied, but I soon saw it for what it was: a fantastic homage and a great spin on an old story.

I think, if you gave any kid the premise of Treasure Island, they’d love it and want to check it out immediately. If you add the words ‘in space’ to the end of that premise? Then you might have a child hyperventilating from all the coolness that idea inspires.

This book carries that out, giving us some awesome fights, incredibly tense scenes of dialogue and double-crossing, some good humorous moments, and a whole lot of knowledge about space travel and life in this strange and different world. It really feels like a wonderful adventure most of the time.

It’s a shame, then, that the book frequently bogs down with all of the knowledge and science that it feels fit to share with us.  Now, I love to learn, so don’t get me wrong, but I don’t love being made to feel stupid by the narrator. Peter and Marthar both explain so many high-level ideas in a fashion that it always sounds like they’re talking down. In fact, a common phrase of Peter’s towards us is ‘it’s so simple that I shouldn’t have to explain it’.  There was at least one instance of that where he said that and didn’t elaborate any further on the topic and I looked at the page, bewildered and thinking, “I DO need it explained to me… Did I miss the required reading for this novel?”

Despite that, Peter and Marthar are both extremely endearing characters, and Silver is an excellent villain.  They hit all the right notes to make us want to see them succeed and fail respectively. Silver’s character is even well-written enough that I was rooting for him at several points of the book and hoping that he’d at least get away with his miserable life.

As far as what this book has to show us from an anthropomorphism focus, there’s quite a bit. To start with, there’s a lot of play between the two races and various attitudes shown for how they treat one another. The humans are generally shown to be more accepting than the Kzin, but both races have their good and their bad and their prejudices never feel tacked on or unfounded. Marthar’s father is especially great in this respect, showing a very human-like Kzin with how he respects people, but also still very warlike and hungry for a good fight like majority of the other Kzin we see. Throughout the novel, we’re shown a great many differences between how the races eat, live, speak, and even sleep, and it all feels different enough without feeling absolutely alien to us. The liberal use of Kzin language helps immensely in this respect. It all comes together for a very remarkable feeling we get for the Kzin by the end of the novel. The Kzin are NOT just upright walking tigers, nor are they humans in a fuzzy getup. They’re Kzin. They have their own culture, their own biology, their own history… They feel like a culture that could actually exist in life, and that makes it that much easier for us to draw parallels to our own world and lives, and yet still feel immersed in this universe that has been shared with us.

For a final word, I thoroughly enjoyed Treasure Planet and would give it a hearty recommendation to folks who love hard sci-fi or classic adventure stories. It’s rare, I think, for those two fields to cross, but Treasure Planet does it well, thanks to a solid base in Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic tale and well-researched writing.

Until next time, mateys!

-Chammy