The Green Odyssey

When Alan Green's starship crashes on a medieval planet overrun with feudal human societies, he is instantly captured and sold into slavery. Big, handsome, blond and strong, on a planet of short, dark people, Green soon finds himself installed as a gigolo to Duchess Zuni of Tropat, the local duke's voluptuous but bath-needing wife. Lazy, cautious to the point of timidity, he soon finds himself under the thumb of Amra, an Amazon of a wife, a slave like him, who combines beauty, and intelligence with five kids, one of them Green's. With himself as gigolo and Amra, as official lernan of the Duchess Zuni, Green is doing quite well in a precarious position when he hears that another ship from the sky has landed a few thousand miles away, and the two men on board mistaken for "demons" and scheduled for execution. Determined to save his fellow Earthmen from death, and himself from Amra, Green determines to cross the grass sea of Xurdimur and get himself to Estorya in time to stop the execution—and incidentally hitch a ride home to Earth. The adventure begins when Alan Green arranges passage on a "wind roller." a sailing vessel of the plains by dazzling the captain with a financial scheme that offers rich profits to overcome his reluctance to help a fugitive. Setting "sale" with the captain, Green thinks he's escaped from his dominating wife—but he's wrong. Throw in pirates and floating islands and a black cat-goddess with a taste for beer, picked up after shipwreck on one of the wandering Islands of the Xurdimur, and you have the recipe for science-fantasy adventure.