The Forgotten Planet

Murray Leinster The Forgotten Planet (1954)
I read this as one of two novels assembled in a big fat collection along with a bunch of short stories. The collection is called Planets of Adventure because all of the stories occur on other planets. Where the adventure comes in is not yet obvious and based on this first one, the thing may as well have been named Planets of Explanation. I suppose I should at least be happy that the common theme is the intergalactic setting rather than characters, as with Leinster's Med Ship books.

The forgotten planet of the title is at an approximately Carboniferous stage of development, having been seeded by ships from Earth which left behind a load of insects, plants, and so on to turn the otherwise barren world into something with an ecosystem. Then another ship crashed there several thousand years ago and our story follows the progress of their distant descendants, who have devolved to something below even a basic stone age level of civilisation by this point. We follow the gang across their foggy wasteland of bugs and fungus grown to gigantic proportions and no-one even speaks until the final third of the novel. Mostly it's descriptions of insects doing things qualified by references to what Earth scientists used to claim regarding the life cycle of such and such an invertebrate, and occasionally our grunting survivors find themselves having to fight off a giant spider. It's more or less a novelisation of a nature documentary, with added cavemen for the sake of focus. It's also three short stories bolted together, of which the first two were written in the early twenties when Leinster was just getting started. Being Leinster, they're nicely written but almost certainly had much greater impact in the twenties than they do now that giant spiders and the like have become somewhat prosaic.

It therefore felt a little like reading a novel about paint drying, although is not entirely without worth and is at least better than Lindsay Gutteridge's fucking awful Cold War in a Country Garden which does more or less the same thing with less charm.