Restoree by Anne McCaffrey

This is the first book by McCaffrey that I ever read. And, guess what! It is the first book she ever had published. It came out in 1967 and I bought it along about then. I had just graduated from college and was still realizing that I now had enough money (on my princely salary of $8000 per annum) to occasionally buy a book. It is not available for Kindle - and the copy I just finished reading is not the first that I have owned.

There are clues that this is an early work. The characters aren't as clearly drawn and convincing as in later works, there are some inconsistencies in plotting, there are even a few spots where it drags a bit - but nothing that kept me from loving this book and rereading it many times. Another curious thing about this book in particular - it doesn't settle down cleanly on one side or the other of the line that separates McCaffrey's work into two categories in my mind. The setting and context here are clearly SF, but it shifts into what is primarily romantic suspense with the SF still dominating the action in the background, but the romance the story around the main character, Sara.

McCaffrey makes an interesting case for a society which has high technology only as a result of having captured it from invaders, and makes much of the technological voids left by having achieved space flight and such by springboard rather than by inventing it stone upon stone on their own. It is in some ways like an examination of Roddenberry's Prime Directive, which has become almost as fixed in current techno-SF as Asimov's Laws of Robotics. Sara frequently wonders why they don't have such commonplace conveniences as zippers, paper, and effective ground transportation. When the locals are ready to mount an expedition to Earth to invite them(us) to join their alliance against a mutual enemy, Sara is delighted to inform them that although earth does not have interstellar travel, there is a planetary defense system and that unaided by alien tech the people of earth have made some forays into space.