Good Reads meta-data is 399 pages, aged 4.52 by 754 litizens.
Genre: SyFy
DNA: Strine.
Verdict: Venusians aren’t from Venus. Who knew?
Tagline: Mirror, mirror.
Presented in that fractured way thrillers are with parallel micro-stories, some of which converge. They include the Zillionaire, the Scientist, the Astronaut, and others whom my light sped forgetter has now forgotten. In a way each has a Damascus experience with the advent of you know whom.
A lot of imagination and (too) much science talk with saluting crowded the pages. I liked the outer space part that occasionally peeked through the technical bushes. Of course it put me in mind of Captain Future soaring the void. But I learned and re-learned a lot about Venus.
I did not engage with any of the characters, but that is probably due to my slightly off mood at reading time due to externalities.
The Russian angle is there at kickoff and disappears. Likewise the hysterical mob reaction is there in macro and micro and then disappears, unresolved as far as I could tell. But I take the point – the most momentous thing that would hit the hardest is the human reaction to aliens, more so than the creatures themselves. The religious crazies, the conspiracy nuts, the racists, the opportunists, the nationalists rivalries, and others too numerous to mention would all beat a drum on the crests of social media. We would tear ourselves apart without any effort from aliens.
I also liked some of the alien’s nostrums. We can’t teach anything you can’t learn for yourselves. That is, you have to learn it for yourself and you will only master and accept what you learn for yourself. Certainly true and dispiriting. Because we don’t always accept what we have learned for ourselves in the contemporary Idiocracy.
First of a series called First Contact by a (Sunshine Coast) Queensland (Kiwi-born) author a few hours away from me when I read it on the Gold Coast. I liked it well enough I to read another in the sequence.