Relic by Alan Dean Foster

Published by Del Rey on August 14, 2018

Relic is sort of a “last man standing” novel, the last man being the last surviving human. So I guess that makes it a post-apocalyptic novel, except that the apocalypse is a really big one.

The last man (as far as he knows) is Ruslan. He has a natural immunity to a biological weapon that killed all the other humans on his world, and apparently on all other worlds to which humanity has spread. Aliens find Ruslan, restore his health, and propose to recreate human civilization by cloning him, adding such genetic variants as they can to create males and females capable of reproduction. Ruslan opposes being the model for a future race, but the aliens — a scholarly race of tripods who are quite fascinated by humankind — hope Ruslan will teach the clones how to be fully human. In exchange for his cooperation, Ruslan wants the Myssari to find Earth (its location has long been lost to history) and to take him there.

To search for Earth, the Myssari look for clues on other planets that humans colonized. Ruslan’s existence soon attracts the attention of another alien race, the Vrizan, who are a bit closer to humankind in both appearance and behavior, which is not necessarily a good thing given human history. Eventually the Myssari and the Vrizan are in conflict about possession of the last surviving human.

By the novel’s midpoint, the reader will learn whether Ruslan is, in fact, the only human left alive. Other challenges Ruslan faces include whether he will be treated as a lab specimen that belongs to either the Myssari or the Vrizan, as opposed to an individual with all the freedoms that individuals should have, and whether as a human he has any claim on now-abandoned human worlds, including the one on which humans originated.

Relic tells a simple story that is pleasant and consistently interesting. It holds few surprises and the aliens seem more alien in appearance than behavior — they could almost be humans if they weren’t so unfailingly civilized. I think a serialized version of Relic could easily have been published in Galaxy or If during the 1950s. I got a kick out of its throwback nature, and I enjoyed it more than a couple of sf novels with more modern themes that I recently started and abandoned. Unlike some writers who are managing to get published, Alan Dean Foster at least knows how to construct a graceful sentence.

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