This is a science fiction book I read in high school, circa 1986 or 1987, it had already been around since maybe the 50’s or 60’s? It’s about an astronaut or maybe an explorer who I think is stranded or left on an alien planet that he is meant to explore or get ready for humans? He stumbles in to a residence and is grateful because he’s close to death, but quickly discovers everything there is not fit for humans so he really isn’t saved like he hoped. He persists. Time goes by. He uses his knowledge and training to adapt the environment to his human needs. He starts to thrive. He’s accomplishing his mission. He gets ready to contact his group. He discovers a mirror. He looks in to it. He’s no longer human. His environment and its systems didn’t adapt to his needs, he adapted to it. WHAT IS THE NAME OF THIS BOOK?

In the late 1970s or early 80s I bought what seemed to be a straight-to-paperback science fiction novel in a Safeway grocery store in Honolulu Hawaii. The events of the novel take place in a futuristic society, technologically advanced to the point where people can be reanimated from death but it is very expensive. The novel was about the seedy underbelly of the society, particularly the industry of prostitution wherein the john could murder the prostitute as long as he paid for her reanimation. The bad guy was one of these johns who was terribly sadistic and his evil nature was graphically shown.

It was ultimately a noirish exploitative nasty piece of torture porn complicated by the technologies of reanimation.

But it was also a mainstream Mass Market paperback about three quarters of an inch thick sold in a major grocery chain.

It may be a false memory but I feel like it was called Crystal Dawn or something like that and showed a recumbent nearly nude female with a giant circular crystal blooming behind her. I see the book is predominantly blue.

At the time I got the feeling the Crystal Dawn name and the picture were both somehow exploiting the popularity of the movie of Logan’s Run, which involved crystals in people’s hands.

It was a very good novel and I felt it was written pseudonominally by an accomplished perhaps even famous science-fiction writer who did not want to be associated with the highly transgressive plot and scenes. I have always wondered who the audience possibly could have been for this book and it was probably aimed at the Gor crowd but it was far too transgressive.

I am unsure of the exact time that I purchased the novel but I can say that The Empire Strikes Back was still in the theaters and it was summer.

I am a big collector of books that I read when I was young and this is the one book I can find no evidence that it even existed. Hopefully it was not a dream because if it was I am in need of therapy.

Good luck and thank you.

Students in a small town discover some teachers are alien. There is a mountain and a cave where the invasion is centered. The boys, I believe, lead the way in stopping the invasion.

I read this book in the 1963-65 time frame. It was available at my local library.

In 1981, in a Utopian literature class at the Univ. of Hawaii at Hilo, I read a book that haunts me because of its prescient look ahead. People live in sealed homes, connected digitally by video and audio to interact with friends and clean versions of the world outside. The interior walls of homes fill up with these images. A kind of solitary confinement no one seemed to mind. Food and goods were delivered to homes through portals by a working class of people exposed to a toxic world outside. I don’t remember details beyond that except that it was written by a man. My online searches for it have failed me!