I #AmReading (actually #JustRead, but that's not as big a hashtag) a #ScienceFiction #TrunkNovel discovered after the author's passing. It's "Voyage to Vaju" by Vernon D Anderson. You get the sense that the author wanted to write a Lost World story, or maybe a 1950s-type novel with declining-civilization, skinny, blue-skinned Martians; noble-savage, robust, green-skinned Venusians; and heroic Earther explorers. He apparently felt constricted by current knowledge of the Solar System, however.

So, instead, Anderson settled for 240-cm-tall, powerful humanoids (bronze-skinned, with pointed, tufted ears) at an early medieval tech level on "Vaju" (which I interpret as "VAriant JUpiter). Vajuvians live a few layers down in Vaju's atmosphere, where the air happened to be breathable to humans, and the gravity was slightly less than Earth's. And where there was a surface like Earth's. The humans who end up on Vaju wonder about all this, but they never find any reason why Vaju is as it is. [Personally, I think it would've been easier to have a portal story to a variant Earth, but I didn't write the novel.]

Anyway, private company Humongous Motors had come up with an innovative interplanetary spaceship good enough to get to Mars in a couple of months. They built two, in fact, the second currently serving as a fully stocked model for paying tourists to walk through to see the future. Fully fueled, too (by authorial fiat), with the ultra-safe ultra-powerful mixture invented by Interplanetary Research. And the crew of the real ship planned to go up soon happened to be acting as extra tour guides. And somehow the ship accidentally launched itself. And the fuel was much better than imagined, but the engines and controls not so much.

After a few days of multi-gee uncontrolled flight, the ship found itself near Jupiter. The crew entered orbit to rest and think, but the engines went wild again, plunging them into the atmosphere. They managed to regain enough control to successfully crashland on the surface of the odd world they never expected to exist. Four crew (captain, copilot, chemist, biologist), and eighteen others (tour guide Dave, his three niblings, and various friends and relatives/friends of friends, most convenient things like doctors, Olympic champions, engineers, and so on). [Again, was contriving this all the best way to go?]

The there are chapters of dealing with various wild animals, and camping out [there are tents, shovels, camping gear, rifles, etc on the ship], and trying to repair the ship, which got a bit mangled in the landing. They decide they need something that will burn very hot, like high-grade coal, in order to straighten out the bent fins. On pretty much zero evidence, they decide that there might be some in the mountains in the distance. So they bury the ship so it won't be bothered by animals, and start trekking toward the horizon.

On the way, they deal with tyrannosaur-analogs, and animals similar to tigers and wolves. There was even a brief truce with lions when one of the party helped save some cubs from a giant lizard, and then the mother lion didn't bother him while the wounded man rested nearby until his party found him. And there were apemen who have tree-villages connected by vineways in the dense forest, but apparently no fire. These folk naturally kidnap a woman, but our brave party rescues her. But afterwards a large group of apemen come and attack the humans.

The humans are rescued by a Vajuvian hunting party led by a prince, and promptly taken captive: such is Vajuvian custom. They are brought back to the locals' city, where they live as slaves for a time. After an incident with the prince's Disney-villain cousin, four of them are accused of attacking royalty. Two choose trial-by-combat in the arena, and win against the three wolves they face. Two choose a race against two chasing cougars, and survive by using a tree to cross a small canyon, skipping half the route. After this, the accused are ruled innocent and the whole group of humans are ruled honorable, and their status changes from that of slaves to that of resident foreigners.

And that's the tale. A "Lost World" adventures-every-chapter tale. Just don't think about the #SciFi setting too much. There were a few bits where the author intruded anti-PC stuff, and the attempt to treat human females as equals of human males was awkward at times. I pretended the novel was written in the 1950s, like its tone suggests, and made allowances. The story wasn't great, but I didn't hate it.