The Great Fetish

Infobox Book |
name = The Great Fetish
title_orig =
translator =


image_caption = first edition of "The Great Fetish"
author = L. Sprague de Camp
illustrator =
cover_artist = Gary Friedman
country = United States
language = English
series =
genre = Science fiction novel
publisher = Doubleday
release_date = 1978
english_release_date =
media_type = Print (Hardback)
pages = ii, 177 pp
isbn = ISBN 0385131399
preceded_by =
followed_by =

"The Great Fetish" is a science fiction novel by L. Sprague de Camp. It was first published in "Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine" in two parts, as "Heretic in a Balloon" and "The Witches of Manhattan", in the issues for winter, 1977, and January/February, 1978, respectively. It was subsequently published in book form in hardcover by Doubleday in 1978 and in paperback by Pocket Books in 1980. It has also been translated into German.

Plot

The book is both an adventure story and a satire on the scientific dispute over Creationism. It is set on the planet Kforri, where descendants of space travelers from Earth have reverted to a pre-technological society. The truth of their origin has faded into legend, and as a result the story of the space voyage and the scientific theory of evolution have become competing accounts of the genesis of humanity. In an ironic reversal, the Religionists hold that man evolved from the native animals of Kforri, while skeptics against the received dogma, known as the Anti-Evolutionists, are more open to the spaceflight theory. Schoolteacher Marko Prokopiu, imprisoned for teaching the Anti-Evolutionist heresy, escapes and embarks on a quest to discover the truth by finding the Great Fetish, said to contain the real story. A parallel motivation is to recover his wife Petronela, who has run off with his friend Chet Mongami during his imprisonment. Marko sets out with the philosopher Doctor Harlan in the latter's experimental hot-air balloon, and they encounter many adventures on the trail of the Fetish.

Trivia

De Camp previously wrote about the actual struggle between science and creationism in "The Great Monkey Trial" (1968), a non-fiction account of the 1925 test case against Tennessee's Butler Act, which made the teaching of evolution in that state illegal.

References

*cite book | last=Laughlin | first=Charlotte | coauthors=Daniel J. H. Levack | title=De Camp: An L. Sprague de Camp Bibliography | location=San Francisco | publisher=Underwood/Miller | pages=87 | date=1983 |id=ISBN 0-934438-70-6