Word: tropies
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...terms, to indulge himself in moments of whimsy, flashes of dandy vanity. Imagine further that he has seen empires and invaders come and go. Now, having dusted the furniture and repainted the house, he throws open the doors to his elegant old home to reveal . . . a dazzle of tropi-colored tricks...
Murder or Not? Vercors' question comes up when British scientists discover in New Guinea a large tribe of cliff-dwellers. Paranthropus ("tropi" for short) is a queer chap, human in that he smokes his meat and buries his dead; simian in many of his physical characteristics; a bit of both in that, though normally erect in stance, he is happy to drop on all fours and thunder off at a gallop. Australian wool interests hope that the "tropis" will prove to be a dream-come-true-workers who can be trained to operate a loom without benefit of paycheck...
Newspaperman Douglas Templemore, an idealist, considers the tropis a fine chance for a test case. By killing his son (bred by artificial insemination of a female tropi), Douglas hopes to cause a riot in the realm of race relations. Is he a murderer or merely an owner of a pet, which he has "put to sleep"? If he is a murderer, he may be hanged, but the tropis (and all so-called inferior races) will gain in security and dignity by judicial affirmation that they are human; if he is not a murderer, racists may at last have legal biological...
...Shall Know Them also contains a halfhearted love story which in no way hides the fact that the book is more a polemic than a novel. On the other hand, since experts have always had trouble defining the novel too, the best all-round term may be: an entertaining tropi...
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