- Cawdron, Peter.
Xenophobia.
Seattle: CreateSpace, 2013.
ISBN 978-1-4905-6823-2.
-
This is the author's second novel of humanity's first contact
with an alien species, but it is not a sequel to his earlier
Anomaly (December 2011); the story
is completely unrelated, and the nature of the aliens and the
way in which the story plays out could not be more different,
not only from the earlier novel, but from the vast majority
of first contact fiction. To borrow terminology from John Brunner's
Stand on Zanzibar, most tales
of first contact are “the happening world”, cutting
back and forth between national capitals, military headquarters,
scientific institutions, and so on, while this story is all
about “tracking with closeups”. Far from the
seats of power, most of the story takes place in civil-war-torn
Malawi.
It works superbly.
Elizabeth Bower is a British doctor working with
Médecins Sans Frontières
at a hospital in a rural part of the country. Without warning, a
U.S. military contingent, operating under the U.N. flag, arrives
with orders to evacuate all personnel. Bower refuses to abandon those in
her care, and persuades a detachment of Army Rangers to accompany
her and the patients to a Red Cross station in
Kasungu. During
the journey, Bower and the Rangers learn that Western forces are
being evacuated world-wide following the announcement that an
alien spacecraft is bound for Earth, and military assets are being
regrouped in their home countries to defend them.
Bower and the Rangers then undertake the overland trek to the capital
of
Lilongwe, where
they hope to catch an evacuation flight for U.S. Marines still
in the city. During the journey, things get seriously weird: the
alien mothership, as large as a small country, is seen passing overhead;
a multitude of probes rain down and land all around, seemingly
on most of the globe; and giant jellyfish-like “floaters”
enter the atmosphere and begin to cruise with unfathomable objectives.
Upon arrival at the capital, their problems are not with aliens
but with two-legged Terries—rebel forces. They are ambushed,
captured, and delivered into the hands of a delusional, megalomaniacal,
and sadistic “commander”. Bower and a Ranger who styles
himself as “Elvis” are forced into an impossible situation
in which their only hope is to make common cause with an alien.
This is a tautly plotted story in which the characters are
genuinely fleshed-out and engaging. It does a superb job of
sketching the mystery of a first contact situation: where humans
and aliens lack the means to communicate all but the most basic
concepts and have every reason to distrust each other's motives.
As is the case with many independently-published novels, there
are a number of copy-editing errors: I noted a total of 26. There
also some factual goofs: the Moon's gravity is about 1/6 of that
of the Earth, not 1/3; the verbal description of the computation
of the
Fibonacci sequence
is incorrect; the chemical formula for water is given incorrectly; and
Lagrange points
are described as gravitational hilltops, while the dynamics are
better described by thinking of them as valleys. None of these detracts
in any way from enjoying the story.
In the latter part of the book, the scale expands at a vertiginous pace
from a close-up personal story to sense of wonder on the interstellar
scale. There is a scene, reminiscent of one of the most harrowing
episodes in the
Heinlein juveniles,
which I still find chilling when I recall it today (you'll know which
one I'm speaking of when you get there), in which the human future is
weighed in the balance.
This is a thoroughly satisfying novel which looks at first contact
in an entirely different way than any other treatment I've encountered. It
will also introduce you to a new meaning of the “tree of life”.
August 2013 