The Iron Thorn by Algis Budrys

I have to admit I read this book almost entirely because it was in an omnibus with two other books I'd already read. I bought the omnibus to have a copy of Hard Landing - still, I think, one of the great under-appreciated SF books of the '90s - and then read Michaelmas because I'd been hearing good things about it for decades.

The Iron Thorn is the third book in the omnibus - actually physically first in the book, since it was a 1967 novel, earlier in Algis Budrys's career. I came into it with no preconceptions or expectations: Budrys wasn't particularly prolific, and his career never had any central theme or even periods that I could discern.

It's an iris-out novel, that traditional SF form that starts in a tight, specific situation - as seen from the people in it, with no spoilers or outside explanations - and focuses on a character who is smart enough and travels enough to go further than any previous members of his group and learns the true secrets of his world.

I'll spoil some of those secrets, inevitably, in writing about it. If you care, I'll keep the spoilers in one discrete paragraph below. Our main character is first called Honor White Jackson - his people, we later learn, have a complex naming scheme that embeds their social rank and specific achievements, so that name changes somewhat as he goes along. We join him during his first hunt in a dangerous desert landscape, out beyond the perimeter of his people's settlement, protected by a "cap" from the hostile environment there and seeking to kill an Amsir, a member of another humanoid intelligent race. The title Iron Thorn is the central spire of his people's settlement, which sits in a deep depression - some readers may realize a crater - and clearly is some kind of technological artifact, probably not entirely understood by these now quite primitive, subsistence-level people.

Jackson is smart, in the way of classic-SF protagonists, and restless as well. His hunt is a success, but he learns things during that hunt that surprise him. His interview with the head of the Honors - the top-caste of his people, the hunters he has just joined - is not as fruitful as he hoped. And so he runs away, with a vague plan the reader is not told, and ends up captured, deliberately, by the Amsirs, who live in another crater with another Iron Thorn.

This is still only about a third of the way into this short novel, and Jackson has one more, massively longer, journey to take and yet another society to be surprised by.

So here's the spoiler: all of this takes place on Mars, possibly slightly terraformed, at least a thousand years in the future. Jackson's people are unaltered humans; the Amsirs were bioengineered from human stock; the whole thing was some kind of experiment that has overrun its protocols and not delivered any solid results to the American Midwestern research institution that originally set it up, so long ago. Jackson accesses a spaceship, and flies off to Earth - his people's fabled paradise - along with a crippled, mentally-damaged Amsir. Since he's of original human stock, the ship's computer makes him its new captain and gives him the usual classic-SF implanted education, giving him the memories and knowledge of an undergraduate career at Ohio State and various post-graduate specializations suitable to spaceship-captaining. On Earth, he finds the usual diminished population of decadents, playing at interpersonal relationships and casually cruel to each other - Budrys never says they're immortal, but they otherwise tick all of the boxes for "decadent far-future immortals" - and they are fascinated by his novelty and primitive vigor. They live under the control - not quite smothering, but tending in that direction - of an omnipresent Computer. In the end, Jackson's even less happy with this world than with his own, and lights out for the territory. But this world is entirely tamed and controlled by that Computer, so we know it's just getting away from the decadent maybe-immortals.

All of Budrys's books that I've read are quick and taut and sparse: they don't waste time or words, and imply a lot more than they ever say. This one possibly even more so, since it's more of a genre exercise to begin with. The ending is a bit unsatisfying, though I think that's on purpose: Jackson wanted to learn the truths of his world, and did - but ended up in a situation where he fits even less well than he did at the beginning of his journey.