Book review: Of Men and Monsters

Classic pulp from William Tenn. I read this when I was perhaps fifteen, and much of the story stayed with me. There are two ideas in it worth having: the first is the "ancestor science", "no, alien science", "no, all science" sequence; and the second is that people are happier as vermin living off another species. The second idea is wrong, of course, but it is a wrong idea worth thinking about.

Other than that... well, towards the end the people are shocked by how callously the monsters rip them apart. Despite them having done exactly the same thing to their enemies earlier. Put another way, the book doesn't manage to keep the people thinking in a consistent way; it doesn't even manage something like "looking at the way the monsters rip people apart, we realise how bad that is, and regret that we ever thought like that", which it easily could have.