“The possibilities were endless and unnerving.”

If I read it now for the first time, I’d probably deem Alan Dean Foster’s Sentenced to Prism too simplistic for my tastes, but having first encountered it in junior high or somewhere thereabouts, I find it hard to shake the archetypal status it has taken up in the back of my mind. It chronicles the Robinson Crusoe-esque expedition of Evan Orgell, a Heinlein-derivative jack of all trades, who is sent to a hostile alien world when his company’s research team suddenly ceases communications with their homeworld. The extraordinary crystalline environment’s resources could lead to massive profits, but the company’s presence there is legally ambiguous. And so Evan is sent in covertly, with only his Mobile Hostile World suit for company and protection, intending to knock his assignment out of the park and then reap the reward of a huge promotion.

Though he’s already dealt with hundreds of theoretical situations—including finding the whole team dead or disappeared—one he hasn’t considered is that his suit might fail him. When the silicate lifeforms of Prism destroy his metal-rich electromechanical exoskeleton, he’s forced to adapt. Er, scratch that. He tries and utterly fails to adapt, and is only saved from certain death by a caterpillar-like creature named A Surface of Fine Azure-Tinted Reflection With Pyroxin Dendritic Inclusions. It is Azure who sticks a few spindly tendrils in Evan’s ear to interface with a disused communication portal on his brain, thereby enabling languageless thought-speech and tentative alliance. Soon Evan finds himself integrating into Prism’s culture, befriending other single-function photovores (while making enemies with others) and teaching them how to make batteries so they don’t have to shut down at night. While searching for the last team member whose locator beacon continues to emit a signal, Evan is eviscerated and only comes through because the ingenious physicians patch him up with homegrown Prismatic technology, at which point he introspectively examines his conception of life, the universe, and everything.

Though technically part of Foster’s Humanx Commonwealth series, it works just fine as a standalone novel. Indeed, it wasn’t until the third time I read it that I looked it up on the web and realized that it was connected to a larger literary world. It’s really only noticeable toward the end when references are made to a heretofore unmentioned galactic church. Even knowing about its existence, I’m uncertain if I’ll ever work up the gumption to take on the thirty-something books that comprise it. I’ll probably return to Prism, though.