Interesting socio-political though experiment more than it is a novel. Looking at in broad strokes, with some occasional microscoping in at key events, two species first evolving then slowly developing culture and technology on sister worlds. The two are vaguely stand-ins for the US/USSR, though there are some pretty serious deviations from both, and it eventually leads to post-ww2 era nuclear stand-off and nuclear annihilation (other than some survivors off planet).
If you're looking for a good narrative driven scifi novel, you might want to skip this as there are barely characters let alone a 'story' in the traditional sense, but it *is* a good read as long as you know what you're getting in to.
Its got a lot of what you'd expect from a 50s/Heinlein era sf writer in terms of glorification of a really strange (definitely not modern) sort of libertarian-ism that still sees value in community and community building. As well as a lot of fear of certainly not real form of communism that inevitably leads to totalitarianism. But they're both such caricatures here in service to the overall fable it feels a lot less out of place.
Also, as others have noted, it was unfinished manuscript of notes after Piper's suicide, finished by Kurland with rather limited changes. ( )

This novel doesn’t get a lot of respect among Piper fans and scholars. John F. Carr in Typewriter Killer only mentions it seven times in the body of that book. First Cycle was written about 1953 for the Twayne Triplets series from Twayne Books. They were the first of what we now called “shared-world anthologies”. Piper’s Uller Uprising was written for the first in the series, The Petrified Planet. The next Twayne Triplet was a fantasy anthology called Witches Three. The next two proposed installments, science fiction anthologies, were never published.

Piper wrote this story, originally called “The Heavenly Twins”, for the fourth proposed volume which was also to include stories by James Blish and Murray Leinster. It was discovered in Piper’s estate. Michael Kurland made some minor changes and revisions to it, but this version largely matches Piper’s original manuscript. The framing device of having a Terro-Human Federation starship show up was a Kurland addition.

Like The Petrified Planet, the story starts with astronomical history, here the planets Thalassa and Hetaira came to be. They circle a common center of gravity in a system with both yellow and red dwarf stars. Hetaira has much more water than Thalassa. Each planet has its own sentient race.

Carr calls it a “deeply flawed work”, “derivative and flawed in its execution”. It’s a political fable, of sorts, of US/USSR tensions and nuclear war. Carr faults the characterization in this novel and states Piper’s best work, with better characterization, stems from 1957 and later and that the “emotional upheaval” of Piper’s separation from his wife may be responsible for that. That may be true, but I’d also argue that it's hard to do a lot of characterization in a 201 page novel where the first half covers millions of years of evolution and cultural development on the two planets.

Piper’s sympathy is clearly with the Hetairans, a sexually promiscuous race who do not have nations but “gangs” and “combines” as their organizing units. They do not have the religious zeal of the Thalassans who have groups more like human families.

Starting on page 203, Piper introduces his main historical analog: the development of Marxism and the Russian Revolution. Here this is the Thalassan work The Organic State.

The scale of the novel becomes much finer at this point as we see the development of radio and attempts by Hetairans to see if they can communicate with Thalassa which they have come to learn has a sentient race of its own.

An expedition is sent to Thalassa, and the Organic State begins to have designs on Hetaira as a water rich world with plenty of room for its population which is ten times Hetaira’s.

The Hetairans are appalled at what they’ve learned of Thalassans with their “hereditary bondage – called ‘government’”. They decide to “sterilize the source of the infection” and launch a nuclear war on Thalassa. Unknown to them, however, Thalassa has developed its own nuclear missiles.

When the Federation shows up, they find two destroyed planets. However, they do find some Hetairans on a mining colony on another world of the system. They’ve lived there since the war 600 years ago. Piper’s sympathy with the Hetairans is made even more clear when the Federation described them as “quite extraordinary”, “a really intelligent people”.

I didn’t find this that bad of a novel. It kept my interest though it is definitely minor Piper. ( )

I liked it because the ideas and writing style are different, which is especially important for keeping science fiction fresh. If you’re looking for a character-driven story, this isn’t it. If you’re looking for something different, or an inspiration to beat writer's block, this is a good book to read. First Cycle teaches a lot about worldbuilding.

https://www.storybookcat.com/2020/04/review-first-cycle.html ( )

This has some fascinating concepts and is unusual for involving humans only tangentially in the frame. Rather it examines two different alien races on sister planets. One, the Thalassans, from amphibian lineage, is probably the most human in its cultural development, eventually developing a totalitarian "Organic State." The Hetairans, from a feline lineage, have not families but "gangs" of related individuals. They're egalitarian in gender and anarchic in governance--not a close parallel, but they're possibly meant to play Americans to the Thalassan Soviets. The book was first drafted before 1964, given it was developed from a manuscript found after Piper's death, and you could certainly see the era's Cold War tensions reflected in the plot.

The problem is this is all tell, not show. That might not be Piper's fault at all. I know from his Fuzzy Sapiens stories the man could write. But this was developed by Michael Kurland from a draft; Piper never had a chance to create a polished, final version. One can tell the major problem with it just by flipping the pages. There's very little dialogue here because except for some vignettes interspersed throughout, this is almost entirely narrative summary of the history of the development of the two races. It might have worked better if like, for instance, Asimov's first Foundation book, it had been worked into a series of stories at key points of the histories, but that's not how it's written, so it's only intermittently interesting. It needed to either be cut and expanded accordingly--or just cut drastically into a short story focusing on the events after First Contact that forms the last chapters. There's just not enough here to make the characters come alive enough to care what happens. ( )

http://www.sfreader.com/read_review.asp?ID=286 ( )