Audible Frontiers, February 2013 (original print publication 1978)

Seven years ago, Bob Kinnaird, high school student, encountered Hunter, a green protoplasmic glob of an alien, and became his host. Hunter is a police detective chasing a criminal, and he and his quarry have both crashed on Earth and are stranded. Since the quarry's crime is callous disregard for his hosts and placing them in danger, tracking him down and stopping him on a planet full of suitable but wholly unaware hosts is even more important.

That problem was resolved, and now, a college graduate with an engineering degree, Bob is coming home to the Polynesian island he grew up on. He's got a job as well as his family waiting for him. Unfortunately, he's also, quite possibly, dying, due to the same friendly alien symbiont who for years has protected him from illness and injury. His immune system and his blood clotting ability and other systems are simply failing, and Hunter, a cop not a medical specialist, has no idea how to fix it. He needs to contact his own kind and get the right specialists on the job, or Bob will die.

This is a difficult problem, but relatively straight-forward--until strange and dangerous accidents start to happen. Or rather, not accidents. One of Bob's trunks of books and possessions being shipped home is tampered with at the dock. His bike is tampered with repeatedly to cause dangerous accidents. The tiny group of trusted friends helping him and Hunter search for the wrecked ships and the means to contact Hunter's people also have accidents.

And they're running out of time, as Bob grows weaker and weaker, and more and more of his body systems start to fail.

The characters in a Hal Clement novel are never deep or complex; they're likable. If really strong characterization is essential for you, no Clement novel is ever going to satisfy. But his characterization isn't bad, either; it's just not very complex. Likable, smart characters are what he does.

What Clement is really all about, and what makes his books a joy, is clever, interesting ideas well grounded in science, along with good plotting that moves the story along. This is a satisfying, enjoyable read, and definitely worth your time--although you'll start off a step up in understanding Bob and Hunter if you read Needle first.

Recommended.

I borrowed this book from a friend. ( )

The sequel to Needle. Set some years after the events of Needle, Bob Kinnaird and Hunter have returned to the island after Bob graduated from college. However, Hunter’s symbiosis with Bob has had unfortunate consequences; Bob’s metabolism has got heavily disrupted to the extent that he is dying so they are hoping to find a way of making contact with Hunter’s ‘people’, who they now realise may have an exploration team on Earth.

The sequel suffers less than the original in the matter of female characters; there are several, two who actually are important to the plot. This may be down to the age difference; Bob was aged around 15 and at a boarding school in Needle; now he’s in his early 20s and left college so instead of going around in a same-sex group, he has matured and actually notices females and accepts them as more-or-less equals.

We learn more about the set-up on the island; the company are benevolent capitalists and take good care of their people. As it happens, it turns out that the two stories are actually set between the end of WWII and the Korean War; actual dates weren’t mentioned in Needle, whereas they are here.

Recommended, but best to read them together.

This book is a sequel to Clement's 1950 "Needle". Though published in 1978 it has the same 50s style and is set in the same period. It fits with standard 50s-60s SF but certainly not his best work. ( )

Set seven years (though written nearly thirty years) after Needle, in which the Hunter, a 4 lb blob of green jelly, arrived on a small island in the Pacific in pursuit of a criminal of his species and took up symbiotic residence in the body of teenager Bob; together they deduced the location of, and destroyed, the criminal. The Hunter remained with Bob through college years away from home, and now they have returned to the island, with a problem: Bob is mysteriously ill with weakness and fatigue, and the Hunter believes his presence to be the cause, but is also afraid to leave because Bob’s immune system has become dependent. The Hunter is a detective, not trained in medical matters, and decides the best hope for a solution is to find others of his species with more expertise. How? Well in the previous book, a component from the criminal’s space capsule was found in the ocean. And since then, the Hunter has gone through a college astronomy course, and realized that the “people” from his home planet should be able to figure out where he crashed. Perhaps they are on the island, but don’t know where the Hunter is or whether he survived, don’t know what happened to the criminal, and can’t reveal themselves.

In Needle, Bob told nobody about the Hunter except the island doctor, most of the dialog was internal between Bob and the Hunter, and most of the activity consisted of Bob roaming the island with a bunch of buddies. Since then, Bob has told his parents. Now he and the Hunter need help exploring the coast for clues. It happens that the doctor’s daughter Jenny, who works in the office organizing medical records, has a boat that she constructed from a kit, and a buddy’s sister Maeta, who works in the library and is processing the college textbooks that Bob brought home, is an excellent swimmer. And Bob now has a little sister, and his mother and the doctor’s wife get involved out of concern and interest. So suddenly females abound. The author is maybe a tad at pains to observe that Bob can be “slow on the uptake” in comparison to Jenny and Maeta, even though he went to college and they did not, and that traits such as bossiness and wishful thinking are general human foibles rather than feminine, as if these are new ideas that haven’t quite sunk in and need explicit statement and repetition, but these are mere quibbles of datedness. The overall impression is more human. There is also a troubled little boy who wants to be included, but has a reputation for playing mean-spirited practical jokes. As in the previous book, geeky bits are scattered throughout, such as a lesson on osmosis, and the “vector sum” of a route to the beach, but in this book are more naturally integrated and less expoundingly tedious. With the wider cast of characters and interaction, I was enjoyably engaged in the story.

(read 4 Jan 2013)