A Planet Called Treason: Lanik Mueller and a World Without Iron

From the man who gave us Ender Wiggin, A Planet Called Treason is an exciting read that really captures your imagination. The idea at the heart of it is so good that you keep turning it over in your head long after you’ve finished, a planet that slowly turns every family stuck on it into something else, and a hero who gets the worst of that deal. It’s science fiction with a proper sense of wonder to it, and it’s a great story. Lanik is only sixteen when it starts, a teenage prince with his whole future mapped out for him, and it takes about a chapter for all of that to be ripped away.

A prison planet with no metal

The story of Treason goes like this. Once upon a time, in the far distant future, there was a revolution, and the old government was overthrown. The new Republic transported its former masters, a bunch of scientists and the families of the old order, to permanent imprisonment on the planet Treason. The prisoners were to be left alone until they could build their own starship and fly to freedom, which sounds almost fair until you realise the planet has no metal worth speaking of. And the old masters of the Empire were never known for being able to work together, so while the punishment might have looked lenient on paper, in reality it was permanent exile for them and all of their descendants. It’s a bit like the way Old Man’s War plays with bodies being remade by science, except here nobody chose it and nobody can leave.

Treason, however, is a “special” planet. As each of the exiled families focused more and more on their own specialisation, generation after generation, the planet changed them and their descendants, making them more and more attuned to that skill. So each family ends up with an ability that nobody else in humanity has, and that none of the other tribes on the planet share either. Every nation on Treason is basically one of those original scientists’ bloodlines, and each of them has gone off in its own strange direction over the centuries. That’s the hook that really got me, because it means every new country Lanik walks into is a whole new set of rules.

The only link to the rest of the galaxy is the Ambassadors, machines that let the families trade with the Republic, and the one thing everyone on Treason wants from offworld is iron. Iron means better weapons, iron means power over your neighbours, and in the long run iron is the only way anyone is ever getting a starship built. So the whole planet runs on what each family can give the Republic in exchange for it. There’s something properly grim about a world where scarcity is the punishment, a bit like the scramble for what’s left in Lucifer’s Hammer, only stretched out over hundreds of years instead of a few months.

Lanik Mueller, heir and limb factory

Lanik Mueller is heir to the throne of his country, and the Muellers specialise in regeneration. They shrug off injuries, their bodies heal scars, cuts and even amputations, which makes them terrifying in a fight because their soldiers just don’t fear getting hurt. The trouble is that some of them take it too far. Their bodies start healing damage that doesn’t exist, sprouting extra limbs and organs, and those unfortunates are called rads, radical regeneratives. And here’s the horrible bit, the extra limbs are farmed by the Mueller rulers and traded to the Republic for iron through the Ambassadors, which is how the Muellers became such a feared force in battle in the first place. As one of the few peoples with iron, their weapons are better than anybody else’s.

So you can imagine Lanik’s shock when he learns that he’s one of the super regenerators himself. Overnight he’s no longer the heir, he’s an exile from the Mueller family and from the lands he was supposed to rule. He realises he’s destined to be nothing but a farm animal, kept alive as a limb factory, and he gets out. But he doesn’t just run, he decides he’ll serve his country in another way, by finding out how some of the other peoples of the world are getting hold of their iron. I really liked that about him, he’s been thrown away by his own family and he still wants to do right by them.

His first big target is the Nkumai, whose sudden supply of metal has let them start dominating their whole region militarily. And this is where it gets weird, in the best way. Thanks to his regeneration Lanik has grown breasts, so he’s able to disguise himself as a woman and pose as an ambassador from the matriarchal nation of Bird, all to work out what the Nkumai are trading for their iron. It’s such an odd idea, and it shouldn’t work, but the book plays it completely straight and it ends up being one of the tensest parts of the book. You’re never quite sure how long the act can hold.

Every family has a different gift

It can’t hold forever, of course. The Nkumai discover he’s a spy, and Lanik escapes again and ends up travelling through the different lands of the planet. On his way to Nkumai he’d already passed through the land of the Ku Kuei, and learned that they can control the flow of time in a bubble around themselves, which is just a brilliant idea. When he comes to the land of Schwartz he finds people who can shape rock to their will and draw energy from the sun, and they’re pacifists too, which makes them stand out on a planet where everybody else seems to be at war. I loved how packed with ideas every one of these stops is, each family could have carried a book of its own.

And Lanik doesn’t just visit, he learns. Being a Mueller turns out to be useful for more than growing spare arms, because he picks up both the Schwartz skills and the Ku Kuei one along the way, and he ends up using them against the “illuders” from Anderson. The illuders, as Lanik calls them, can appear to be anything they like, clouding the minds of everyone around them, and it turns out they’ve had a lot more to do with the state of the planet than anybody realised. The book starts out as fairly hard science fiction and slowly shifts into something that feels almost like epic fantasy, with families who are close to gods, and that’s a big part of why it captures your imagination the way it does.

It’s a short book by today’s standards, and it moves fast, so there’s no time to get bored. Lanik goes from prince to exile to spy to something much more powerful in not many pages at all, and every leg of the journey shows you another corner of Treason. It does mean some of the families only get a chapter or two, and you’re left wanting more of them, but I’d much rather a book left me wanting more than outstayed its welcome. The ending is a big one too, and I won’t spoil it here, but it’s dramatic and it changes the whole planet.

Still waiting for the rest of the story

Published more than 35 years ago, this book is crying out for a sequel and a final conclusion to the saga of Lanik Mueller and the people of Treason. There’s so much world here that never gets used. I want to know more about the Nkumai, about Bird, about the Ku Kuei and their time bubbles, and about what happens to a planet like this once the rules it’s lived by for centuries get turned upside down. It feels like the first book in a series that never happened, and that’s a real shame, because a setting this good deserved more than one book. And then there’s the starship, the whole reason the exiles were dumped there in the first place. Everything on Treason is built around the dream of building one and flying away, and I’d love to see somebody actually try it, with all of those strange gifts pulling in different directions. Would the families even want to leave by then? That’s the question I keep coming back to, and it’s one only a second book could answer.

Which of the families on Treason would you most want to belong to, the Muellers with their regeneration, the Ku Kuei with their time bubbles or the Schwartzes shaping rock? Tell me in the comments.