Word: tropies
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Dates: during 1953-1953
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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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