TRANSIT
by Edmund Cooper

I wish I’d written this ...

... because the scenario stretches the imagination!

Two men and two women are transported by aliens to an island on another planet and are left there to survive as best they can. What we get from this scenario is a terrific novel in which the developing situation is matched by convincing character development, and where the reader comes to genuinely care about the protagonists. This isn’t a novel of PK Dick or AE van Vogt inventiveness—it more resembles the cozy style of John Wyndham—but, as with Wyndham’s work, it provides a very satisfying read.

From the publisher

He was the subject of an experiment seventy light years away from Earth.

It lay in the grass, tiny and white and burning. He stooped, put out his fingers. And then, in an instant, there was nothing. Nothing but darkness and oblivion. A split second demolition of the world of Richard Avery.

From a damp February afternoon in Kensington Gardens, Avery is precipitated into a world of apparent unreason. A world in which his intelligence is tested by computer, and in which he is finally left on a strange tropical island with three companions, and a strong human desire to survive.

But then the mystery deepens; for there are two moons in the sky, and the rabbits have six legs, and there is a physically satisfying reason for the entire situation.

The first page

The face stared back at Richard Avery, expressionless as a ghost. It was a bloodless face, he thought, the face of a man in limbo. It was the kind of face you did not look at too closely on the Underground in case its owner had died.

He moved away from the silvery grey mirror of the puddle and heard his feet squelch in the soggy earth. He gazed at the gaunt trees and the dull green emptiness of Kensington Gardens. London’s Sunday traffic purred moodily in the distance; but February seemed determined to drown the landscape in a watery silence. And as the sad thin light of afternoon patiently died, it was possible to believe that Kensington Gardens was the most desolate place on earth.

The trouble with Avery was simple. He was recovering from influenza. The depression of the landscape and the depression of his state of mind matched perfectly, reinforcing each other. He should have stayed indoors watching the television, reading a book or playing his habitual meaningless games with the patterns on the wallpaper.

But, after a week’s imprisonment in his two-roomed flat, after more than a hundred waking hours of solitary confinement with nothing but the memory of inadequacies and disappointments to keep him company, anything seemed preferable to the voices that never made a sound, the accusations that were never uttered.

At thirty-five, Richard Avery was a failure. Not an amateur failure; a professional failure. He had made a pretty good job of it. Fifteen years ago he had been all set to be an artist. Not necessarily a good painter, but at least one who slapped colour on the canvas as if he really meant it.