this present age. This is true because no literature can conceive essential changes in human nature which have yet to be experienced in real life without losing touch with reality, depriving itself of universality and thus reducing itself to mere curiosity in-

terest.

Not only is this little realized, but scant note is taken of its most important consequence. In transposing today's problem into the terms of reference of a fictional tomorrow. science fiction gains the status of the parable, and its message, enfilading the bastions of prejudice, strikes home subtly into the flank of the mind.

This being so, one would think that many writers would have appreciated that the science fiction story, correctly handled, could be most effectively used to point up certain truths about homosexuality without the tedium and offensiveness of the social tract. In fact, few have done so, though I do cherish one brief mention, in a story about a world which had gone underground in a total war, with all the inhabitants reduced to drab uniform, of the "gay colours of the registered homosexuals." Just that, no more-but what a world of pondering is called up by consideration of a time when even women, poor souls, must be drab in appearance and only the gay are allowed to flaunt their individuality!

Of the few authors who have tackled this thorny subject, most distinguished in my opinion is Theodore Sturgeon, for his shorts "The World Well Lost," "Scars" and "Affair with a Green Monkey" and for the novel under review.

Venus Plus "X" is at once adventure and an allegory. It tells of a young flier, coming round in a hospital after a crash, who believes that he has travelled in time, to a world in which the whole sexual nature of

man has changed, the people having become hermaphrodites who fertilize each other in the act of love and both bear children. In fact, his idea of time travel is a delusion in which he has been encouraged to believe, and he has accidentally landed in the middle of a vast experiment in surgical and genetic change which is taking place in his own time, in the midst of his own country but concealed from all outsiders.

The purpose of the experiment. which is not self-perpetuating but requires the performance of surgery on the very young, is to eliminate the hostility between the sexes which is postulated by the author as the origin of all human conflict and thus the eventual cause of war.

The value of the book in so far as we are concerned does not lie in these theories, interesting though they are. but in the way in which the stupidity of sexual prejudice is indirectly exposed, in a manner more acceptable to the prejudiced because of the apparently remote context in which it takes place. Step by step the Utopian life of the hermaphrodites is counterpointed against the struggle and tension of everyday living; step by step the central character seems to move nearer to an understanding of the true significance of the allegory, only to be confounded at the very last by the depths of his own prejudice.

To those of our friends who have hitherto summarily dismissed science fiction as transposed Westerns or "space opera" I most seriously recommend this challenging and intensely thought-provoking book. I would give much to know whether the result was what the author intended, or whether he was merely exercising the writer's recognized privilege of using very real issues with which to construct a great yarn. Either way, it is a decided success. B. E. J. Garmeson