Tadiana ✩Night Owl☽'s Reviews > Trog

Trog is a 1944 novella that's currently a nominee for the 2020 Retro Hugo award, in the novella category. Review first posted on Fantasy Literature (along with a link to Internet Archive, if you're really interested in checking this out):

It's the 1950s in this story, and civilization is severely breaking down all over the world. People called Troglodytes or "Trogs" have been mysteriously destroying key equipment and industries. The prevailing theory is that humans have a mass consciousness that is fed up with technology and wants to send humanity back to more of a Middle Ages type of existence, so this group-mind thing temporarily possesses individuals, turning them into Trogs. To add to the problem, Trogs can also cause everyone around them to temporarily black out, so no one ever sees them committing the sabotage. People walk around, worrying that they themselves are Trogs who committed destructive acts during their black-outs.

Trog is very much a tale of its era, with tough-minded, competent men who whip out world-changing technical gadgets, mostly useless and decorative women (when women even appear in the story at all), and — this is a 1944 story, after all — Nazis nefariously scheming to take over the world. Despite these drawbacks, and the minimal characterization, I did think this was a reasonably entertaining story, plot-wise.

The “collective unconscious of humanity” theory admittedly doesn’t make much sense, but then, large groups of people often do in fact adopt ideas that in retrospect seem utterly nonsensical, and of course here it turns out that something entirely different is going on. Good thing we have the heroes to save the day … before the plot really had a chance to get exciting, unfortunately. Still, giving due consideration to when it was written, Trog wasn’t so awful that I think it deserves only a single star. That dubious honor I’ll reserve for Intruders from the Stars.