User:P64/FSF/Doona

Decision at Doona is a science fiction novel by Anne McCaffrey. It was her third book, all edited by Betty Ballantine at Ballantine Books, and one of four in print before her 1970 emigration to Ireland. In April 1969 it was a Ballantine paperback original; the first UK (Rapp & Whiting, 1970) was its only hardcover edition.

Decision at Doona is set on the distant, Earth-like, fictional planet Doona. It became the first book in a so-called Doona series more than twenty years later when McCaffrey and Jody Lynn Nye wrote two sequels together, Crisis on Doona (1992) and Treaty at Doona (1994).

Origins
McCaffrey dedicated the book "To Todd Johnson—of course!", for her son (now Todd McCaffrey) provided the inspiration and model for Todd Reeve, the six-year-old son of the main character. He was thirteen years old when it came out. Thirty years later he recounted that he had been directed to lower his voice as an actor in the fourth-grade school play, with his mother in the auditorium. That was the inspiration for the Doona story, "an overcrowded planet where just talking too loud made you a social outcast". (That overcrowded planet is Earth, briefly featured at the beginning of the book. Soon the main characters eagerly depart to colonize the Earth-like and apparently virgin Doona.)

Plot summary
A two-page list of characters precedes the story: first Hrubbans, then humans. Hrubba is another fictional planet distant from Earth, with a bipedal but otherwise cat-like dominant species. Hrubbans and humans select Doona for colonization at roughly the same time and for similar reasons. Moreover, both have strict rules against contact with planets inhabited by other sentient beings.

Both Hrubban and human are technologically advanced people who have exploited their home planets intensively and expanded to other planets primarily for natural resource extraction. Their home planets are exceptionally dense with many restrictive social conventions. Doona is a "pastoral jewel" similar to the ancestral world —says the First Speaker of Hrubba, but it is equally true from human perspective. Because it is also too poor for industrial-scale extraction, both make it available for old-fashioned settlement. One hope for this type of colony is to recover some of capabilities and outlooks that enabled their species to dominate.

Kenneth Reeve, "jack of all trades", is one of a dozen men in the human group. They travel to Doona, complete preparation of homes and fields, and discover the alien village across the river only after their wives and few children are already en route to join them. They feel condemned to return to Earth. The Hrubbans are equally surprised, with a difference: slightly earlier to arrive, they recognize that humans are alien and successfully play the part of natives. Yet their colony too may be recalled.

Ken and his "incorrigible" six-year-old son Todd separately take the lead, on the human side, in making friends with the presumed natives. Todd proves uniquely adaptable, partly because he alone never adopted terrestrial norms. He proves also a prodigy in learning the Hrubban language, first for ordinary use such as friendly intercourse with the village, then nuances crucial for high-level diplomacy. Mediated by Todd, the governments behind the tentative colonies agree to a 25-year experiment in cohabitation.

Series
More than twenty years after Decision, McCaffrey and Jody Lynn Nye collaborated on two sequels. The three books constitute the so-called Doona series.
 * Decision at Doona, by Anne McCaffrey, 1969
 * Crisis on Doona, by McCaffrey and Nye, Ace Books, March 1992. ISBN 0-441-23194-2
 * Treaty at Doona (US title), by McCaffrey and Nye, Ace Books, September 1994. ISBN 0-441-00089-4

Orbit Books published UK hardcover and paperback editions of Crisis in July 1993; hard and paper editions of Treaty Planet in February 1994, which were the first editions of Treaty at Doona (US title).

Ace published a trade paper single-volume edition (omnibus) of Crisis and Treaty in 2004, entitled simply Doona.