Detailed view for the Book: Violent Man, the

Title:

Violent Man, the
 

Authors:

Genres:

Science Fiction
Alternate History

Editions:

# Date Publisher Binding Cover
1 1962-00-00 New York : Farrar, Straus and Cudahy  

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Blurb: 
Reader community synopsis (by Peter D. Tillman at Amazon):

The maguffin is Operation "Future Victory", an alt-hist Red Chinese experiment in brainwashing, for the future conquest of the whites by the yellow Reds (his language -- it's a book of its time). The scene is a remote Chinese political prison, sometime in an alternate 1950's. The Reds have sentenced a group of about twenty Europeans, and two Americans, to death --unless they can convince their captors they've become good Communists. The prison Commandant has set up notional three-month checkpoints -- no progress towards becoming a good Red (or piss off the Commandant) and it's the firing squad for you, boyo. The Commandant has total despotic power over the prisoners, and is a veteran of thousands of executions in the great purges following the Chi-com takeover. Shooting the odd European, pour encourager les autres, doesn't faze him a bit.

Our Hero is an American, Ruxton, the titular Violent Man and a standard-issue van Vogt 'human' (=alien) superman. He's irresistible to alien-human women -- shortly after his arrival in the prison-camp, he accepts the plea of a beautiful Japanese girl, the Commandant's wife's maid, to be her lover. Soon after that, he's servicing the wife, too. Van Vogt's women are even more alien than his men, which is even more striking in this nominally non-fantastic novel, than in his SF.