[NOVEL] The Quiet Invasion
The Quiet Invasion, by Sarah Zettel. First reading. Genre: soft sci-fi.
I enjoyed this novel quite a bit, in a somewhat abstracted way. I felt almost no emotional attachment to any of the characters, which I've found to be true of almost every soft science fiction novel I've read. I think the genre's focus is inherently different from what I usually look for in a story: this type of novel tends to be about ideas more than anything else.
Having said that, Zettel did a very good job of maintaining my interest in the story, although my lack of emotional engagement kept me from having a burning desire to know what happens next. The story is one of first contact between humans and an alien race known only as the People. It also draws in political threads, as most of the human-centered action takes place on a colony above Venus, in an era when Earth and its colonies have deep-rooted distrust of each other. The political background is filled in without dropping the reader out of the story, which is quite an accomplishment to the mind of someone as disinterested in politics as I am. The individual human characters didn't grab me, but the situation of humanity itself was very interesting.
However, I think the real strength of this novel lies in the People. Zettel successfully walked the difficult line of presenting a completely alien species without the benefit of them being seen through human eyes. This is extremely difficult to carry off: enough detail has to be presented to convey the culture's difference from the readers', but without it distracting from the alien's sense of the everyday. This is hard enough when writing about two human cultures, when there is still enough fundamental similarity that comparisons can be drawn without the creation of a whole new vocabulary. With a truly alien race, it's probably impossible to manage perfectly; in this case, a large chunk of the book passes before the People and humans meet each other, and despite having enjoyed and connected with the People's half of the novel, I was still startled at their difference when it finally came down through the human filter.
Overall, I think that The Quiet Invasion manages to take a common premise and produce something fairly unique. It's too far outside the type of story I usually read (fantasy is definitely my spec-fic flavor of choice) for me to judge it against other books of its type, but I enjoyed it more than most books of its genre that I've read.
I enjoyed this novel quite a bit, in a somewhat abstracted way. I felt almost no emotional attachment to any of the characters, which I've found to be true of almost every soft science fiction novel I've read. I think the genre's focus is inherently different from what I usually look for in a story: this type of novel tends to be about ideas more than anything else.
Having said that, Zettel did a very good job of maintaining my interest in the story, although my lack of emotional engagement kept me from having a burning desire to know what happens next. The story is one of first contact between humans and an alien race known only as the People. It also draws in political threads, as most of the human-centered action takes place on a colony above Venus, in an era when Earth and its colonies have deep-rooted distrust of each other. The political background is filled in without dropping the reader out of the story, which is quite an accomplishment to the mind of someone as disinterested in politics as I am. The individual human characters didn't grab me, but the situation of humanity itself was very interesting.
However, I think the real strength of this novel lies in the People. Zettel successfully walked the difficult line of presenting a completely alien species without the benefit of them being seen through human eyes. This is extremely difficult to carry off: enough detail has to be presented to convey the culture's difference from the readers', but without it distracting from the alien's sense of the everyday. This is hard enough when writing about two human cultures, when there is still enough fundamental similarity that comparisons can be drawn without the creation of a whole new vocabulary. With a truly alien race, it's probably impossible to manage perfectly; in this case, a large chunk of the book passes before the People and humans meet each other, and despite having enjoyed and connected with the People's half of the novel, I was still startled at their difference when it finally came down through the human filter.
Overall, I think that The Quiet Invasion manages to take a common premise and produce something fairly unique. It's too far outside the type of story I usually read (fantasy is definitely my spec-fic flavor of choice) for me to judge it against other books of its type, but I enjoyed it more than most books of its genre that I've read.