Perhaps it was the weird, snow-less winter that led me into the New Year reading assorted books on aliens and the unexplained.  I awoke one morning and looked out not at the expected winter palette of white sky, white ground, black trees, but to an other sky: fuschia, striped with purple clouds and dotted with confused migratory birds.  This was a day ripe for alien invasion, I thought, with the logic of the recently dreaming.  I reasoned that a lack of snow and our global warming trend is all too convenient for off-worlders looking to colonize.  The usual cold would slow the joints of their extra, inner mandibles, and snowflakes blur multi-faceted eyes.  Snow could be just what discourages the average alien looking to probe, conquer and vacation.   Aliens are just harder to imagine thrashing about in snow drifts and contending with entire neighborhoods of down-swaddled men wielding snow blowers.  Well… fun to imagine, but harder.

So, for lack of something to shovel, I spent my leisure time indulging in otherworldly fiction.  The recent Kepler finds of planets thought capable of life reinforce the possibility of “others” out there, watching us, coveting our planet for its tasty people and affordable cellular plans.  Like “post-apocolyptia,” (see Old Man and the Wasteland),  alien fiction is a chunky subset of science fiction, rooted in vivid pulp paperbacks that once sold at train stations and in dime stores.  Tales of sky visitors or things from other dimensions were probably a favorite topic of our fur draped predecessors. Imagine them huddled around campfires, sharing fantastic tales with gestures, emphatic grunts and shadows thrown on cave walls.  So, with a nod to my tangle-haired ancestors, I found several fresh, independently published novels on alien menaces.  Us vs. aliens.  Us as aliens.  Angry, unreasonable, invasive aliens. Some with their own livestock.

I first read the ambitious debut horror novel Red Gods , by James Finan. In this short book, the picturesque English village of Fernby Lakes is experiencing both an intense amount of snowfall and a marauding unknown supernatural entity. (Aliens in snow!?!)  History of the area indicates that it may be a worn spot on the fabric between worlds, and something has slipped through.  The creature that becomes known as the Shade is certainly (happily) not native to this world.  As the book begins, a misfit para-military squad is being sent to access and confront whatever caused the recent massacre in the village.  A pecking order is gruesomely established by the squad’s alpha males before approaching the village, and the violence and evident lack of sanity of one of them makes him a suitable weapon for the coming battle.

The book is presented in short chapters from varying, sometimes odd perspectives. The author brandishes a handful of styles to paint his story’s picture as we shift from plot/story to military-style evaluation report, snippets of folksong, astronomical texts and other extraneous background material.  Finan knows his characters and tells the story with enthusiasm, broad vocabulary and sometimes startling dialogues.  Action sequences are well-imagined, and the segments involving insight into the creature’s psyche are particularly engaging.  Red Gods was a fun, quick read, and a good start on my otherworldly reading menu. For me, it suffers a little from the frequent shifts. Longer fiction has leisure time and page count to change narrative without disrupting the reader from the general flow. Red Gods might benefit if it were lengthened, run past a forthright editor who knows the genre, and republished.

Next came Half Way Home, by Hugh Howey.  While this is a stand-alone, Howey is the author of a couple of series of short fiction.  I’ve been enjoying Howey’s current Wool serial, and I may offer a review of those here in the future.  Half Way Home makes “us” the invading force on a strange new planet.  Spaceships are sent out by terran corporations, complete with terraforming and exploration equipment and an entire community of unborn people.  If conditions are favorable on a new planet, these people are formed and nurtured in life pods.  Each potential person is educated and physically trained in vitro from birth to adulthood to perform a specific task in the community when they are awakened.  While they grow, a base is set up, land cleared, crops started all by remote.  If the planet is judged to be hostile, inviable or unprofitable, the entire project is aborted and destroyed.  In the middle of just such a situation, something causes the abortion sequence to stop.  Amid fire and chaos, some pods open and little more than 50 newly born teenagers are poured out prematurely into their new world.

Told in first person from the perspective of a young man, Porter, who was intended as the community’s psychologist, we follow the struggle of their first days as they see to the immediate needs of the community and form friendships.  The survival tale turns to intrigue as someone suffers a fatal accident and the home planet starts making urgent, unreasonable demands on the half-formed community.  Some of the teens mutiny, and leave the shelter to journey from the little known into the unknown on this nameless planet.

Some books that read as quickly as this one might pass through and be discarded by your consciousness.  But in Half Way Home, I found myself wanting to linger with this group.  To me, that’s one of the hallmarks of a successful book.  I found myself wanting to explore the planet more fully, learn more of its flora and fauna, to watch the community thrive and grow, and see Porter conquer his uncertainties.  There are not a lot of surprises in this book, but the ground it revisits is fertile ground – a new planet ripe for alien infestation – in this case, us.

New Years’ weekend was rainy and chilly – perfect for reading – and I ran across the fun Beyond Armageddon series by Anthony DeCosmo.  It’s a series of five novels (and counting) set on an Earth that’s been invaded by not one breed of alien, but several.  Main character Richard “Trevor” Stone is an ordinary, beleaguered car salesman when the world changes.  Fleeing into the countryside, he meets a mysterious old man who seems somehow part of an even greater conflict.  Stone is given three unlikely gifts – abilities that will help him in the future. Using his special talents to battle or evade alien forces, Stone becomes the one man who can assume the heavy mantle of leadership, gathering what’s left of humanity to him not just to survive, but to fight back.

It’s a very ambitious venture for Stone (and author, DeCosmo) to tackle a total invasion and the total expulsion of alien forces from Earth.  I was surprised by the variety of alien adversaries.  From years of movies and books, one might come to expect a single multi-form beast, sentient ooze, or even a thing riding a sort of pseudo-reptilian dog or mount, etc.  While reading the first part of this book, there’s such a variety of aliens that I said aloud… “did they bring their livestock with them?” It made me smile, reminding me of Teenagers from Outer Space, a 50s movie where humanoid aliens land on Earth, looking for a planet to use as pasture for their giant lobsters.  So few alien flicks give such a reasonable explanation for invading Earth!  But I digress, and Beyond Armageddon doesn’t seem to be about livestock.  Indeed, many of the different aliens are viciously adversarial to one another, like Mothra and Gamera before they teamed up.

I hesitated to review Beyond Armageddon before finishing more of the series.  But after reading the first installment, I was committed enough to know I’ll be wandering into the second.  Book one is an ample 410 pages that reads easily between life’s usual distractions.  The writing is entirely unassuming. The story is told with gusto and at a quick pace as Stone’s band of fugitives carve a pleasant foothold against the alien occupation.  It’s one of those books where it helps to set aside your disbelief, shutter your critical eye and just jump in.  I found it satisfying, like having pizza when you’re hungry for anything but the healthy food you have in the fridge.  And, since reading it made me shirk chores a couple times, I count it as my first guilty pleasure read of 2012.

While I’ve been writing this, nature’s ladled out enough white stuff to insulate me, for now, from all but the most hardy aliens in foul-weather gear.  Their goofy antennaed eyes will be fixed on southern lands instead.  Still, just a glance over smooth sparkling snowscapes makes it so easy to entertain thoughts of other worlds. Armed with a plucky attitude gleaned from these books, I grab my coat and shovel.  “Let them come,” I think, stomping out into the unknown.

The three books I mention here are all available and nearly free on Amazon.  Beyond Armageddon is an older title with current and new additions to the series.  Red Gods was provided for review by James Finan.

© 2012, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.

Where does our fascination with post-apocalypse time periods come from?  Does it derive from delicious wonderings of how we would fare in a survivalist situation?  How would we solve the loss puzzle of feeding and housing and procreating ourselves while staving off… well, post-apocalyptic stuff?  There’s such a rich variety of challenge to be had!  Radiation, zombies, mutant bog creatures, feral human gangs, alien clean-up crews and more.  An Armageddon for every taste.  Some stories linger on what the actual apocalypse was, but most just charge ahead into how-we-survived tales as dramatic as struggling Pompeian refugees - death and volcanic ruin behind them and the promise of founding Venice ahead.

That was what I was thinking when I picked up Nick Cole’s The Old Man and the Wasteland.  The genre goes back further than you’d think, and by now it seems a well-trodden path.  I nearly put it aside.  After so many movies and books, after hundreds of hours spent creeping through the colorless wastes of Fallout 3 and countless other games, shouldn’t I be world-weary of whatever world the varied apocalypses gave rise to?

Apparently, the answer is no.  My reluctance to revisit another ruined world evaporated as this simple story entangled me – an homage to Old Man and the Sea.  The tiny part of my mind that likes to keep things tidy looked for props to the often force-fed Hemingway as the rest of my mind just enjoyed the book. 

The Old Man here is never named, and lives in a small village on the outskirts of what was Yuma, Arizona.  It’s been many years since the bombs fell, and as we meet him, he’s a scavenger who’s not brought back anything useful to the village in quite some time.  Many believe he is unlucky.  Still vital and sinewy after half a lifetime of scavenging, the old man is faced with becoming obsolete and a burden to his village and family.   As he packs a small bag of provisions, he dismisses the thought of taking the one book he owns with him.  The Old Man and the Sea.  He’s read the book too many times to need it with him, and sees the parallels to himself throughout the story as he makes his decisions.  He’s become Hemingway’s hero, whose empty nets were seen as a curse by his village, and who goes out into the sea alone to land a great fish. Our old man leaves his village before dawn, heading into the desert wastes in hopes of bringing back something useful that will restore his place in the village and break his streak of bad luck. 

It is a short book – so I won’t detail any of the challenges the man faces on his journey - but the author does a great job of managing the tension in this walkabout through a predominantly empty environment.  Both the scenery and the quest seem remarkably fresh.  There is still beauty in the rugged landscape, and the man’s appreciation of small, vital things: fresh water, fire, and food (even if it’s rattlesnake) made me want to follow this man to the end.  His reality before the apocalypse had become much like a dream to him, affording very little time for thought of loss but guiding him with landmarks as he wanders the shattered highways, seeking the old desert cities.  Along the way, his instincts, learned survival skills and cunning prove much more valuable than anything in his pack.  While he could survive alone for the rest of his life, he is driven to return successfully to his village or die having tried to be useful, and it endows this ordinary man with a mantle of nobility that acknowledges survival of the human spirit.  That is the cleansing punchline, or should be, to all such dusty wasteland tales, and the author achieves it here with a light hand.

A book like this is a great way to spend an afternoon.  I looked up from its last pages satisfied, and I appreciated, for a moment, the shelter around me and the least can of beans in my cupboard.  Okay, only for a moment.  Then I ordered take-out. 

I’ll keep an eye out for Nick Cole’s next book

The Old Man and the Wasteland, by Nick Cole. Published in paperback April 2011 by CreateSpace ISBN 1461076382. Also available for Kindle and Nook

© 2011, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.

Ready Player One
Ernest Cline
Random House. August 16, 2011
384 Pages (or 15 hour audio narrated by Wil Wheaton)

Set against a back splash of a ruined world where most of the inhabitants have escaped to live online, Ready Player One ferries us to a future that’s all too feasible.  It’s 2044, and a kid named Wade is our lumpish progeny, nurtured at the teat of technology and having little interest in the real world or even in the real Wade.  When we meet our orphaned hero, he lives in a teetering stack of trailer homes on the outskirts of nowhere, grumbling about the absence of God, scavenging tech equipment and relying on his wits to stay alive and online.  90% of his life is lived in OASIS, an enormous, largely benevolent virtual reality derived from multiplayer online games (or MMORPGs).   Put on a visor and a pair of haptic gloves and OASIS is your retreat from the physical world: a vast collection of possible and impossible worlds with a stable economy, perfect weather, jobs, and free education (with travel and “material” goods available at nominal micro-transaction prices). 

In OASIS, Wade becomes Parzival, a low-level avatar who attends a virtual public school.  Beyond his approaching graduation, Wade’s future looks pretty bleak, but then James Halliday, the creator of the OASIS system, bequeaths his company and entire fortune to the first person to find the “Easter Egg” he hid in in the system, and Wade sets out to find it with the same kind of instincts that keep his body functioning in the real world.  

Halliday was an introverted visionary, obsessed with the 1980′s – a formative decade for him and for computers and gaming.  The keys to finding his Easter egg are hidden in early gaming puzzles and 80′s culture references.  Wade becomes a serious “gunter” (short for egg hunter), methodically studying old text games, becoming an expert on 80′s consoles, episodes of Family Ties, Japanese cartoons, movies, commercials, music videos and  minute details of the life of James Halliday that are all archived in OASIS.  Wade’s avatar races to different locations and solves puzzles to progress on the scoreboard, much like playing in an actual MMORPG.  There are friendly competitors as well as drones of a powerful super-corporation bent upon winning, but since Wade told us at the end of the brief, seemingly tacked-on opening “Chapter 0000”  that he’s won, this is just the tale of how.  What’s telling about Wade is that he has only the vaguest plans for the prize itself.  And since his focus is on the achievement rather than the goal, I think that’s where Wade loses me a little.  This is usually the point where the hero does it all to save the farm…but perhaps the farm comes later.

While Ready Player One is an engaging read, I was disappointed by a couple things – one of them being the “I won and here’s how” self-spoiler.  It’s not that the journey isn’t good fun, or that I’d seriously consider Wade might not win, but I’d like to have gotten there with him rather than being lead down the path.  Actually, now that I’ve said that – there might have been more interesting alternatives to him winning, but those were roads the author firmly closed to that pesky reader’s imagination.  By doing so, the story cannot help but be predictable – ancillary characters appear and disappear as needed, and any threat to Wade carries little punch. 

The book also tends to tiptoe around what I consider to be the intriguing issues, ideas that are tossed into the morality scales but remain unweighed.  Should we escape to better, created worlds, or work to fix the real one?  We may have such a decision ahead of us.  Would that sort of world free or shackle us?  Open virtual public schooling?  Part of me says “great idea!” and the other part hangs back, trying to repair the vision of a nation of pale, non-socialized humans that might result.  I can only assume from his light hand with the major “problems” that the author intends to return to this setting, much like Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games series.  Having created a near future when our grand-kids have retreated from the real world is far too interesting a premise not to smell “sequel” to me.  I just hope I’m just smelling sequel and not bad movie. 

A big part of the book’s attraction is rooting Wade’s achievement on his knowledge of the 80′s –  a time most  of us lived through and remember with nostalgia and a sudden desire to go to the mall.  If you think it unlikely that a young man would want to study a past decade so thoroughly, imagine the library parking lot the day Bill Gates decides to award his fortune based on a Civil War quiz.  Having, myself, survived and possibly thrived in the 80′s, I enjoyed Wade’s visits to OASIS virtual shrines of pop culture: planets called Gygax, worlds based on Blade Runner, RUSH lyrics and Zork, and boxes of Cap’n Crunch in every virtual kitchen.  I enjoyed the references as part of my own history, and as Wade continues his studies and quests, the book has the interesting perspective of a fictional future looking into our remembered past. 

I really looked forward to reading this book, but feel that the probable sequels will flesh this story out better.  Ready Player One feels quickly written and is quickly read.  The author, Ernest Cline (whose writing history includes the movie Fanboys) might have made this into a very good 600 page novel rather than what seems a readable screenplay treatment that strokes our nostalgia.  Take an intelligent young man with time on his hands, add fodder for the reader’s memory mill, gaming references, light romance, an evil corporate adversary and the pursuit of treasure, and what results is a pleasant, late summer beach book – entertaining without the burden of substance.  I’d recommend it as such, possibly for young adults – but it saves most of its fun for those of us who lived, gamed and struggled to mature in the 80s.

© 2011, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.