The setting of the story is a forceful admonition for environmental consciousness. Readers may be gratified to realize that in the decade following this book's publication, people became more aware of and began to work more diligently to preserve our natural resources.

The most prominent element of The Huntsman which may damage its appeal to parents and teachers is its violence. Any human encounter with the alien beings results in slaughter or cruel enslavement and a single objective surfaces—one side can triumph only through annihilation of the other.

It appears that the human characters have adopted the ruthless attitude of the Slavers. Hill's defense of this stance is discernable in the story of the "Forgotten Time" when humans attempted friendly communication with their oppressors and learned that any contact meant death.

Descriptions of the genetic experimentation of the Slavers may cause adult critics to...