Author: Andy Kasch
Publisher: Amazon
Rating: WARTY!
Erratum:
Towards the end of chapter one "ReserachLab 71" should be "Research Lab 71"
This novel (complete with a rather ambiguous title!) begins with a human being abducted by aliens. We do not immediately learn what happens to him, but instead are taken to a distant star system where a minion is showing a VIP around a space station. Because of his exemplary conduct, the minion is assigned to a project to revive the humans - some 370 of them - who have been abducted over a 45 year period from Earth for study by the aliens.
There doesn't appear to have been much studying going on, however, since the humans are all in cryo-storage. The only tests which have been done are simply assessments of the physiology and testing for disease vectors. The aliens want to revive the humans because it's felt that humans will have good strategies for fighting or better yet, avoiding an interstellar war which is threatening to erupt.
After a turf war with the scientists, it's resolved that initially only two humans would be revived, the very first to be 'frozen' and the very last in order to see how each fares. I guessed that one of these would be our man from the opening pages, and the other would be a woman and the two would fall in love, but I had to read on to find out.
I had some issues when starting this novel. Indeed, when I started reading the first few pages and learned that all the aliens had names appended with a number, like Mip7 and Arkan9, his colleague on the revival experiment, and they had hover cars and swore in obscure non-words, I honestly felt I wasn't going to like it, but it grew on me.
Another problem is one not related solely to this novel but to all novels of interstellar war. It makes no sense, and I have yet to read a novel which justifies why an alien race would be dead-set upon conquering a new world. Even in movies like Independence Day which attempt to justify it by depicting the aliens as nomadic planet plunderers, it still makes no sense. Space is almost unimaginably massive and the costs of traveling it would be exorbitant - nowhere near enough to be offset by the "profit" which could be hoped for from plundering a planet's resources- not when there are closer planets with the same resources.
People who balk at walking ten blocks to the store (like most Americans, for example!) can't be expected to conceived of how far it truly is to another solar system, much less how far it would be to one which might have life on it. The distances between stars are all but insurmountable, and even if those were not, the distances between stars where civilizations exist would be even more prohibitive.
And for what purpose would this invasion be? What is it that an alien civilization could glean from Earth that they couldn't get from elsewhere? Fuel or energy? There's nothing on Earth that can be used as fuel that can't be found on most planets. Food? Life can prey upon other life on Earth because all of us share a similar biology - deep down where cells make energy. We all grew up together, but it's highly debatable whether a species from an entirely different planet would even be able to digest food that has evolved elsewhere.
Any civilization capable of developing advanced interstellar travel would have technology galore. They wouldn't be in need of resources. They could tap the barren plants in their own system or in nearby systems if they needed more. If they were as aggressive as they're depicted in your typical alien invasion story or movie, the chances are that they'd have self-destructed before ever they found Earth!
Having said that, who doesn't love a good alien invasion story? So we put all those objections aside - assuming we've even considered them - and sit back and enjoy, and try not to be too critical! That was my strategy here.
Unfortunately, the more I read, the less I liked. The story was boring, and I completely lost interest in it and abandoned it, not caring about the aliens or the humans or what happened to any of them. I can't recommend this.
