Szału nie ma. Dość konwencjonalna, drugorzędna literatura sci-fi. Trąca myszką, zwłaszcza w warstwie dialogowej. Spokojnie można sobie podarować. ( )

Aldiss is okay, in this one, but it's one of his very earliest, and I'm fond of it. It has shown up as part of an Ace double, but this appears to be the earliest (US) publication. Not everything ages well. I love the note in the back:

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A Note from the Author

Science-fiction stories featuring galactic empires have always intrigued me, partly because I had the chance of seeing at first hand the uneasy relationship existing between "imperialists" and subject races in India and Indonesia. So there's a galactic empire in this book with Earthmen on the receiving end as subject race. The plot hinges on the notion that the further spread your empire is, the greater are the opportunities for graft therein.

So the villains of the piece are not so much the all-conquering "nuls," as the size of the galaxy and the economics involved in its rule. At the same time, the fact that the four central characters each have good reason to mistrust the other three does complicate things.

I hope it doesn't complicate things too much. Van Vogtian complexities of plot and sub-plot are not for me. This book aim at being a simple study of four pretty hard types each trying to out-think the other.
+++++

I couldn't have said it better myself. It's a nice addition, if you're just adding to a collection, but I don't know that I'd read it now, if it was new to me. Aldiss has done better. ( )

The interpreter between the colonized Humans and the 3-legged Nul is not loved by the people and knows too much for the Nuls to let live when a liberal administrator shows up to review their actions...
Apparently Blish spent some time in India and Burma when a soldier in WWII. Perhaps redolent of "Burmese Days" by George Orwell. ( )

[Bow Down to Nul] is about a distant future where humans are the subjects of a tripedal alien race which rules a galactic empire. It follows the story of the honest official who goes to inspect earth (suspecting local rule has become corrupt) and the human translator assigned to him who is caught between his loyalty to humanity and the fact that he will have little to no opportunity to slip the truth to the visiting official. (Minor note: the visiting official may not be male. The alien conquerors have three sexes (male, female, and neuter) which is never referred to in public life. However, in a flaw that [[Ursula LeGuin]] would later point out, all of these sexes are referred to as “he”. This is not fair to 2/3rds of the aliens in the book (if the sexes are distributed evenly.))

The book had an excellent beginning, a snappy plot, and an ending that somewhat disappointed me. I found the romance between the official’s human translator and a female junior translator unconvincing. My favorite character was a minor one. Worth reading but an odd mix of predictable plot and character elements (Was the junior translator the only woman on earth? I was rooting for the chemistry between the senior translator and his butcher: it seemed more plausible) and surprising ones.

An interesting treatment of colonialism where we, for once, aren’t the imperialists.

-Lisa Shapter ( )

Meh. Not a single interesting or unique idea in the whole book. Some of the core ideas are better developed in John Christopher's Tripods trilogy; and when I can compare the key antagonist unfavourably to the protagonist in L Ron Hubbard's "Mission Earth" series, you know that this book must have problems. I suggest Aldiss stops slagging off writers such as John Wyndham until he learns how to write. ( )