Book about a world of women where a man crash lands trying to find his way home?

Question

I read this book in 1989 and got it from my high school library. It had an interesting cover of a ship on the waters with a man and a woman on the cover looking at the sun. It was called something like underneath the sun or something to that effect but for the life of me, I can't find it anywhere regardless of the search term I use. I don't know what the exact year of the novel's publication was, but it couldn't have been more than 10 years earlier, so probably mid-late 70's to possibly mid-late 80's.

The story was about a pilot that crash lands on a planet and quickly finds that it's all women. They run everything and men are nowhere to be seen. Later he finds out that there are men and they are kept in very pampered conditions and used for, well procreation and maybe even pleasure but mostly as stud stock basically. The women have no problem being intimate with each other which is common and they are soldiers, leaders, so on and so forth, they run everything. So he is under the protection of this lady captain of a ship who finds his man-oriented world fascinating and gives him some slack to be more than the men they usually have.

He goes on quests with them, they find him very capable but ultimately he falls in love with the captain because he is not sure he will ever be able to leave the planet and might as well make the best of it. They find ruins that show evidence that maybe at some point this planet was more dominated by men but something catastrophic happened causing them to die off and so now they are a rare commodity. I remember I picked this up just on a whim and I couldn't put it down, it was far more interesting than I am able to convey here and I have always wanted to re-read it again as an adult with a lifetime of experience to see if my view of the story is still the same as it was when I read it the first time but no luck finding it. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

You might be looking for To Stand Beneath the Sun. It was published in 1986 and the title obviously "matches" your criteria. (I found it by searching on Amazon with "beneath sun science fiction", so if this is the novel a single additional word can make a significant difference in searching!)

The cover does not have a woman looking at the Sun, but the social position of women and men does match, the captain was the man's protector and did allow him significant freedoms.

The book's setting also did not have a previous time when men were equally common, instead the sex ratio was planned as part of the colonization effort. (Apparently, the space travelers had temporal stasis fields but not uterine replicators!)

The man discovers (thanks to a solar-powered laptop-like device that he had) that an escape pod from the colony ship had landed on land. This pod could be used to waken the colony ship whose orbit was slowly decaying (which was why his pod was jettisoned). Reaching the pod required crossing a substantial desert.

Answer 2

First answer seems right, but the book seems to be a copy of a much earlier Gene Roddenberry Story that was made into three movies starring John Saxon and Diana Muldaur...

Strange New World - 1975 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0073754/*

Planet Earth - 1974 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0072000/

Genesis II - 1973

I remember watching these when they first came out on on CBS.

Answer 3

Without a doubt, you are looking for Poul Anderson's "Virgin Planet". I too got it from a high school library, and remember it as you do. Yellow jacket, black title, a very simple hardcover.