Sandworld
Reviewed date: 2025 Jul 6
Rating: 1
188 pages
Store brand Dune, with vampires
I swore I would never read another vampire book after the last one, but here I am again. How can I resist Twilight Dune? “Stranded on a strange alien planet with a race of alien vampires!” Yikes.
It was not a great book. It had its fun moments, but once again I vow to never read another vampire book.
Jungle planet
Five people in one station wagon find themselves suddenly transported from California to a jungle planet. Inmates Red O'Reilly, Bennie Nebayan, and Willie B. Hutkin, corrections officer Marc Mauriello, and ACLU lawyer Ms. Alice Michaelson are driving the 101 freeway in San Francisco on their way to the courthouse. One moment they are driving down the freeway through the torrential rain. The next moment the station wagon is in the middle of a dense and verdant jungle, with no freeway and no city in sight.
Desert planet
The lush jungle evaporates before their eyes, and the whole world is revealed to be sand. The top layer of the sand is dehydrated trees, animals, etc. It's sand, but everywhere that a drop of water falls, the vegetation springs up in moments, then withers away and dehydrates into tiny spores. It's a fascinating idea. Preposterous, but fun. I like it.
No help coming
The party realizes they are alone on an alien planet. There is no help coming, and the only order of the day is survival. Unfortunately, officer Mauriello is rigid-minded and unable to recognize the reality of their situation. He refuses to unshackle the inmates, and uses his shotgun and pistol to maintain control. Eventually the others overpower him. O'Reilly is elected leader. They pick a direction and head off across the sand, hoping to eventually find something.
Vampires in the night
During the night wraith-like vampires snatch Bennie Nebayan and drag him off. Later, the rest of the party finds a walled city. Just outside the city walls they find Nebayan's body: dessicated and sucked dry by vampires: "All that was left of Bennie Nebayan was a few pounds of cracked, dried bones and skin."
Vampires in the walled city
The party continues into the city, which appears long deserted. Deserted except for some vampires, who pursue the party. Eventually our heroes discover there is an underground network of transportation tunnels beneath the city. The vampires drag down and kill Mauriello, which allows the others to escape into the tunnels. The transportation network is still functional, and automatic, so they ride a moving belt to another city.
Tyahnans
They emerge from their trip to find a bustling cosmopolitan city populated with vampires. The vampires explain everything. This is the planet Tyahn, and the vampires are Tyahnans. The chief Tyahnan, Dzozong-gnyadzong, explains that about 20,000 years ago they invented a means of interstellar transport. It operates sort of like Star Trek beam transporters, but across interstellar distances, and only at the speed of light.. Unfortunately there were some accidents, and various unsuspecting people were snatched off their planets and transported to Tyahn. This is what happened to our heroes. They were accidentally snatched up 20,000 years ago, beamed across 20,000 light-years of distance, and rematerialized in Tyahn. The vampires/Tyahnans are very sorry. They are also very sorry about the actions of the criminal outlaws (wild ones, they call them) who murdered Nebayan and Mauriello.
A whole new world
The Tyahnans can't send O'Reilly, Alice, and Willie back. For one thing, they don't know where Earth is located. For another, it's been 20,000 years. All they can offer is the services of their civilization: full access to the transit beam network, to go anywhere, explore anything. Dzozong-gnyadzong assigns Zagdan-gyatzan to teach them how to operate the transit network. Their first test trip is to a nearby planet of Ptayeem, which has long since been abandoned.
Ptayeem
But of course it's not. And this is odd, because after the main plot (where our heroes find themselves on a strange alien world, survive the desert, lose two of their number to vampires, and encounter the Tyahnan civilization) now they have a little side excursion. It turns out Ptayeem is populated with the degenerated descendents of Tyahnans. The Ptayeemin are small, minimally intelligent, and worship their ancestors (the Tyahnans) as gods. When Zagdan-gyatzan, O'Reilly, Alice, and Willie come through the transit beam, the Ptayeemin immediately grab them. They put Zagdan-gyatzan on a throne, and tie the others up with the intent of killing them as sacrifices to their god.
Of course our heroes get out of the predicament and make it safely back to Tyahn. O'Reilly, Alice, and Willie, now fully trained in the operation of the transit beam network, set out from Tyahn to go explore the universe.