Review by Marian Powell   —   August 29, 2002

"...very likely, you are the last Terran alive or awake on earth."

When he hears those words, Bradford Donovan, an angry, embittered middleaged man who lost his legs in an accident years ago, realizes that he is in a hopeless situation. Earth has been at war for three years with an alien race. Donovan's two sons are off fighting somewhere in space while he resentfully works at a dull earth job wishing he could take part in the war effort. Suddenly there is an attack from space and within hours everyone around him seems to slip into a coma and then the invaders land and, after a brief, one-sided fight, he is captured. He has even lost his artificial legs in the fight so he is truly helpless. Now he learns that he is totally alone, a helpless prisoner. There's nothing for it but to put his imagination and his knowledge of the enemy to work and find a way to defeat the entire invading army! At first he has no help. Then another survivor turns up, a hunter who had been on a camping trip and is managing to avoid being captured. He and Donovan have never met, have never heard of each other, yet they find a way by luck and guile to work together to win against impossible odds.

Why do books become lost? All too often, a good, enjoyable adventure story is lost because it's not a classic and the author never became famous. Yet when I've mentioned the title, those who read this story when it came out remember it and exclaim, "Oh yes! Gremper's ghost!" Needless to say, I'm not going to say what that refers to as it would involve detailing the entire plot. I recently found it in a used book store, reread it and found I enjoyed it just as much as when it ran as a serial in Analog Magazine in 1964. I still remember the Analog illustration of a group of high ranking officers all with the words semper vigilans on their sleeves and with instruments around them blaring a warning of imminent attack. They are all sound asleep at their desks.

The plot begins with the enemy dropping a substance that puts humans into a state of hibernation for months. The enemy soldiers invade and take over every major military installation on the earth. The author has cheerfully placed his two heroes in an absolutely impossible, absolutely hopeless situation and then has them find a way out.

When I reread the story, I found that some details have not worn well. There is a lack of imagination about future technology and there are no women characters. Women are vaguely mentioned in their traditional roles as wives and mothers and that is all. Minorities of any sort are barely mentioned. The Sleeping Planet simply ignores everyone in the world but its main characters and that works very well although if you wrote it today, you would write it differently.

To me, Sleeping Planet is not only a good yarn in its own right, but it represents a whole field of lost books. That's one reason used book stores are so much fun. It's well worth spending time poking around amongst the dust covered shelves, not looking for anything in particular but simply looking for these stories that are not quite good enough to be remembered, yet thoroughly enjoyable for a quick and pleasurable reading. Like the best of all literature it has one great message summed up in a saying by Yogi Berra, "It ain't over til it's over". That is, no matter how bad the situation, there's always a way out, always the possibility of a last battle. In The Sleeping Planet, Donovan is faced with the possibility of man going down, not with a bang, not with a whimper but with a snore and Donovan finds a way for man to triumph against all odds. And that is a message that, no matter how often it is repeated, is always worth hearing again.