The Right Hand of

Breakout #2

by David J. Lake

To the purple born, the key to life on Earth is the DNA helix, which determines all the characteristics of every living thing. The helix, a series of molecules within the life cell, is a spiral - with a left-hand turn.

The planet called Dextra could have been a duplicate of Earth. It teemed with life, both flora and fauna. But on Dextra the helix of life had a right-hand thread. And there could be no viable combination between the two life forms, the native and the invading Terran.

So it became a battle on the part of the colonists to uproot the native Dextran ecology - purple plants and beasts with surprising intelligence - and replace it with Earth-born green. But the planet fought back in its own way. And the result is a science fiction novel that is unusual, exciting, and highly original.

Covert art by George Barr.

Genres: Science Fiction

176 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published April 19, 1977

About the author

David Lake was educated in both India and England, then taught English in various countries, including Vietnam and Thailand; since 1967 he has been at the University of Queensland, Brisbane. He began creative writing as a poet about 1970.

Reviews

[Jim]

This is a book that I read years ago and enjoyed it--but I decided to read it again, as I did not remember why I liked it so much! It's a story about the human colonization of a very Earthlike planet named Dextra. The problem is that life on that planet has a DNA helix with a right-hand thread. Human DNA is "left-handed" making any native foods of the planet lacking in nutrition for humans ( and vice versa!). Conflict arises as the colonists carry out plans to replace the Dextran ecology with its purple plants with Earth green. The planet has its way of fighting back... I realized that I enjoyed the book so much because I thought that was a great concept in the story. There is a sequel which I will read.
David J. Lake ( 1929-2016) was an Australian science fiction writer.

[Michael]

This is in that category of “I’ve read worse books, but I’ve certainly read better.” It wasn’t terrible – every time I thought it was completely giving in to cliché or predictability, the author pulled a minor surprise that made it better – but it still only barely held my interest, for the most part. I assumed while reading it that the author was new to writing (correct), but also had the impression that he was young, inexperienced, and poorly educated (all wrong). As it happens, David Lake held advanced degrees in linguistics and was nearly fifty when he wrote this, so I can’t blame the shortcomings on youth.

The concept of the book is that humanity, having finally destroyed its home planet in a vicious nuclear war (today it would be environmental collapse), has emigrated to the first planet it found capable of supporting life. Unfortunately, it learned after getting there that native foods were poisonous, or, more accurately, non-nutritious, to Earth life. The reason for this is a funny slight change: our DNA spirals to the left, while Dextran natives spiral to the right. This may be where the linguistics studies come in: “dexter” is Latin for “right.” The humans dedicate themselves to re-creating left-handed life forms on Dextra, and wiping out the native flora and fauna. Five hundred years later, when this book takes place, they are about halfway toward meeting their goal, but new evidence begins to suggest that there may be intelligent life on the planet after all.

I think the reason I assumed that Lake was young is that he tells this story from the point of view of a young man (no more than 19 or 20, I think, though I don’t remember it being specified), whose experience of the world appears very limited. He is a “saint” from New Jerusalem, which is the center of human population and is dedicated to spreading the religious ideology that justifies deliberate mass extinction on Dextra. On the other hand (heh), he is also an exobiologist with a fascination for the native life forms, and in the course of the novel moves further and further from human civilization into the native wilderness. There is a genuine arc to his development, and also some rather creative ideas for the alien life, although an awful lot of it falls back on imitating Earth models or creatures from mythology In fairness, when the nature of the sentience is revealed, this is compellingly, originally alien.

In certain spiritual traditions, the Right Hand Path is that of union, while the Left Hand Path is that of separation. Lake toys with this a bit, suggesting that humans, by their very nature, are separate and incapable of ultimate harmony. He shows the tragedy of this, but doesn’t quite make a case for its power, although he is to be credited for suggesting that both have a place in the Universe.

[Sol]

This falls squarely in the "sometimes interesting, often amusing, not quite compelling" category for me. It's also a very 70s book, with ESP, transformations, a little sex and psychedelia. None of the characters interested me, the world situation is not particularly unusual (humans colonizing a planet with incompatible biochemistry), and there is almost no conflict in the plot at all. Still, it's written with more grace than you typically find in midcentury scifi, and diversions like Shakespearean centaurs kept it lively enough. A family tracing itself to a Chinese patriarch, LARPing as ancient greeks, and celebrating the 4th of July was an amusing enough idea to justify the book's existence. Unfortunately, no single idea in the book is explored very deeply, and as it gets to the ending it dumps out its whole schema in a couple pages of solid exposition.

The author's history in scifi is pretty unusual, having pursued graduate degrees in the arts, and published poetry before publishing any science fiction. According to wikipedia, he got a PhD a mere two years before publishing his first novel (at age 47!), and he continued to write science fiction intermittently until almost 2000. I suppose there's no shortage of people who ask themselves if it was worth it after getting their PhD.


The appearance of the plant-like Dextrans is the twist, such as it is, of the novel. That's one of the joys of Barlowe's Guide to Extraterrestrials: it's rarely clear if the creature depicted is a bit player or the lynchpin of the story.



I really like this drawing. The faceless orb, the "petals", the variety of textures. It's vaguely menacing, but the colouration is almost alluring. The sketchbook also includes an excellent drawing of the Dextran's locomotion and the engorged petal.

[Bart Hill]

Oddly, I liked the way the story turned out. The last two chapters made this slow developing novel mostly worth reading. But, I wouldn't suggest anyone to read it.

[Rageofanath]

I liked the concept. I disliked the characters.

The book tried to focus on two things and shortchanged both. Either it should have focused on the culture or the ecology of Dextra, or doubled its size to give space for both. So much time was spent talking about the religious setup that there wasn’t enough space to discuss the far more interesting events that were occurring with the fauna. I found the story of the native animals far more unique and memorable than the culture.

I also had a number of issues with the culture. Human civilization on Dextra claims to be 500 years old, and there is clearly a backstory as to how they got there in the first place. However, anything remotely cultural or artistic is drawn from small pockets in “Old Earth” history. Despite employing and training sociologists, there has been very little cultural development on Dextra, and the history of space colonization and war leading up to the first 100 people landing on the planet plays no role in their culture. Instead they skip back and model ancient Greece, mix religions, and quote William Blake. There is literally only one person on the entire planet making art of any kind. Mark and Miriam try to account for this by using some “graven images” religious quote, but even Earth history shows that in cultures where there were religious restrictions as to what could be depicted in art, the practices of making unique art still thrived. Two examples that come to mind are Islamic art and Medieval illuminated manuscripts.

Also, Mark and Miriam seemed pretty quick to just toss out their religious upbringing once they discovered they liked having sex. They didn’t seem to have much of a problem doing this, even though usually people don’t just go “oh sex is fun, the religion that I grew up with that tells us not to have sex and even gives us a scar to enforce this point must all be wrong and I’m totally over it” over the course of only 3 days... with no regrets. If religion wasn’t really that important, why did we have to spend so many pages explaining and emphasizing it?

Which gets to the most annoying part of the book. Too much sex, not enough action. There is only one gunshot in the whole book, and its depicted on the cover. These people were in an unusual setting, with an engaging mystery going on, and only 176 pages to tell the story, and we don’t even get a good love story to go with the somewhat arbitrary sex. Mark and Miriam are betrothed from the first page, but they don’t seem to care about each other. Then Mark has sex with a hot blond chick. Miriam gets jealous even though she explicitly gave him permission, then they make up and are magically deeply in love, and proceed to call each other painful pet names for the rest of the book. Oh yeah, and they’re cousins. Which makes the affair so much harder to care about.

The blonde chick then proceeds to have sex with every available male character, including animals. Virtually none of the sex is described, just implied, so the potentially redeeming erotic factor is not there.

However, despite all of this, what is actually happening on Dextra is really, really interesting. There are creatures called Fawns, and they have been changing rapidly to become more human-like. The mechanism behind this is fascinating, and the implications of “handedness” of DNA is a really fun concept to play with in a theoretical way. I also think Mark and Miriam made the wrong decision at the end of the book, and it was obnoxiously hypocritical for Miriam to claim that she couldn’t make the "decision" for anyone else, but then 5 seconds later, she makes the decision for another person.

In conclusion, it was “OK”.

[Valerie]

This is another of Lake's books that has a cunning conceit, but very little good development. If one group of living things have ecologies based on dextrose, and another on levulose, WHY would they necessarily come into conflict? It's not as if they're even competing for the same resources, except things like land, water, minerals, and air. Is there any real shortage of these? I don't remember that there was.

I don't have a copy of this first volume in hand, so I'll reserve more detailed comments to the second volume in this series: The Wildings of Westron.