The novel “The Forgotten Planet” by Murray Leinster was published for the first time in 1954 as a fix-up of three short stories published in previous years.

Humans have colonized a lot of planets in the galaxy. When a planet is uninhabitable but has an interesting potential it start getting “seeded” to make its conditions right. Over the millennia, many planets were made habitable but in one case the documentation got lost and the process was interrupted. When a spacecraft has a malfunction and the survivors get shipwrecked on that planet they have to survive as they can.

Burl is a distant descendant of the shipwreck’s survivors and like the others must face every day the giant insects that live on the planet. Some events awaken his ingenuity and allow his group to go beyond the momentary survival to improve their living conditions.