About this book

Virgin Planet is a male fantasy gone wild. Explorer Davis Bertram lands on a planet full of beautiful women. The women are the descendants of a few hundred survivors of a crashed colony ship full of women. Bertram quickly finds paradise to be a deathtrap. The colony has developed a system of parthenogenesis (similar to human cloning) by which they can propagate the species. But none of them has ever seen a man. Nor, since the planet--named Atlantis--has no mammals, do they have any idea what a human male might be like. (The largest species on Atlantis are huge flightless birds; but birds don't mate quite like mammals do.) Some of the women accept Bertram as a man, but others fear he is a Monster. The most powerful faction, the Doctors, prefers to see Bertram dead, because the arrival of Men would end the Doctors' power as sole keepers of the secret rites of parthenogenesis. Bertram makes a few allies--Barbara and Valeria--but is mostly used as a pawn between various factions vying for power. It's worth noting that despite being the only man on a world of women, Bertram is remarkably unlucky at love.

Publication Details

Publisher
Warner Books
Published
1973
Pages
159
ISBN
9780446754620
Language
en

About Unknown Author

Poul William Anderson was an American science fiction author who began his career during one of the Golden Ages of the genre and continued to write and remain popular into the 21st century. Anderson also authored several works of fantasy, historical novels, and a prodigious number of short stories. He received numerous awards for his writing, including seven Hugo Awards and three Nebula Awards. Anderson received a degree in physics from the University of Minnesota in 1948. He married Karen Kruse in 1953. They had one daughter, Astrid, who is married to science fiction author Greg Bear. Anderson was the sixth President of Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, taking office in 1972. He was a member of the Swordsmen and Sorcerers' Guild of America, a loose-knit group of Heroic Fantasy authors founded in the 1960s, some of whose works were anthologized in Lin Carter's Flashing Swords! anthologies. He was a founding member of the Society for Creative Anachronism. Robert A. Heinlein dedicated his 1985 novel The Cat Who Walks Through Walls to Anderson and eight of the other members of the Citizens' Advisory Council on National Space Policy. Poul Anderson died of cancer on July 31, 2001, after a month in the hospital. Several of his novels were published posthumously. Source: Goodreads

Track your reading journey with BookOwl