Terra – Mitch Benn

A well-known radio and television personality in addition to regular appearances on the comedy and music festival circuits, Mitch Benn, currently touring in the role of Zaphod Beeblebrox in The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Radio Show Live, has now added yet another line to his resume with the publication of his debut novel Terra.

When Postulator Dfst-sh-Kshck-sh-Lbbp finds an abandoned Ymn child on Rrth,  the primitive world he has been investigating, he returns with her to his own planet Fnnr where he raises her, naming her Terra after her own people’s archaic name have for their distant world.

The narrative swiftly leaps forward to Terra’s first day at her new school, the Lyceum, where she mingles with Fnnrn children her own age but with whom she has little in common, neither biology nor psychology, though she does share a desire to learn and wish to be accepted.

Fortunately, the people of her adopted homeland are peaceful and accepting, and she is soon introducing them to Ymn traits she has inherited without ever having consciously developed them such as her penchant for imagination and storytelling, revolutionary in a society dedicated to truth and scientific knowledge where fiction has never been conceived.

While no indication is made on either the jacket or in the supporting publicity, the book is clearly aimed at children, not only from the age of the lead character but from the broad strokes of the pantomime characters who are Terra’s absent biological parents and the simplicity of the prose style.

All the actions are immediate, the characters living intensely in the present, with no convincing lives or history to them or their society. There is little depth to events or the thoughts of characters the reader is party to, nothing beneath the events rippling across the surface of the novel, though like the proverbial shallow water, to its advantage it does run swiftly.

While the preponderance of comedy names inserted at every opportunity may grate with older readers, a plot focusing on an unconventional childhood and the expectations and possibilities of growing up indicate that the book may best be enjoyed when read by a parent to their own child, a first introduction to the wonders of prose science fiction, before steering them onto works where the science is more fully realised than just stating that the anti-gravity technology relies on “purest quality grav-matter, fresh from the mines of Shth-Shn.”

There are moments when Benn includes his more experienced readers in the fun, with each of the four sections of the novel named after a classic genre film or show, When Worlds Collide, The Thing from Another World, The Invaders and Forbidden Planet and Lbbp’s contemplation on the poor success rate of alien invasions of the seemingly primitive Yrth.

Terra is now available from Gollancz, and we recently interviewed Mitch Benn about his role in The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

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