It has oceans - with teeming green on surface. But 'there was not a single creature that thought. It's extremely fertile & is teeming with life - plant, animal, & tough to classify. 'World with no name'.That's the planet where the story is set - an unnamed world that is not earth. Major monsters: ' Air-devil', ' Akadi', ' Silverslith', & ' Photoids'.How the native humans ended up on this world?.In the end, there is a revelation about the world that sounded like a set up for sequels! Story could well have ended without this revelation. And tendency to engage in dialogs when a monster in on your tail sounded very weird.

Thing that particularly irritated me was generally extremely juvenile behavior of one of visitors rescued by the hero. But action near end is great & overall I'll call it a decent read. This story has its irritants, & I found it a bit draggy part of the way through. Couple of Weinbaum stories I've read also have this kind of adventures, but their backgrounds tend to be less complex. Foster is much less rigorous than Clement, but introducing an artificial world by setting up a plot that involves travel through the world is also Clement style. I found much similarity in style with some stories of Hal Clement & Stanley Weinbaum. But above setting about sums up the plot. That's about the setting of this story - adventures of a hero from a tribe in this extremely hostile world.Ī background for adventure & climax is provided by visit to this world of the equivalent of modern humans with their fancy technology, but with a complete lack to survival skills in this world.Īctually the story is not set on earth & doesn't involve time travel. Now put them on an earth may be 200 million years back in time - when dinosaurs still roamed the land. Take a few hundred modern humans - not the urban educated types, but jungle folk well versed in living off land. Related: Midworld vs Hollywood movie Avatar.

Midworld by Alan Dean Foster