Moonstruck

The good. Lerner has come up with a good twist on the traditional first contact type story, which is refreashing in and of itself. The book is well written and the plot interesting. What if earth were discovered by what amounts to a tramp freighter from an advanced civilization. In some ways very much like some small island cultures 1st had contact with the outside world in the 18th and 19th centuries. And suppose like those encounters the crew and passengers see an oppertunity to make a quick buck at the expense of the primitives. But this time with something far worse than just cheating the natives with unfair trading. The bad. Only a couple of the characters in the story are well developed. The rest seem very cardboard. The story seems to really just plod along in some places. While the aliens are alien enough is appearance, their thinking isn`t. But having radically different aliens think like humans is a very common flaw in almost all science fiction. But it brings up something else. The aliens seem to be ripped off (pretty blatantly ripped off at that) from one of L. Neil Smith`s more obscure sci-fi novels "Their Majesties` Bucketeers" published by Del Ray in 1981. Overall it`s a decent book. Not great by any means, but worth reading. I posted the review with four stars, but it`s really more like three and one half stars.

A great, classic first-encounter novel for the 21st century: think Childhood's End, The Day the Earth Stood Still, and To Serve Man, served up with the cutting-edge media savvy of Jon Stewart. Lerner writes with grace, surety, humor, and political wisdom that draws on sources ranging from Damocles to Churchill. I snapped up this novel on Cape Cod Bay, and learned anew why I relish science fiction.

Ed Lerner is a warped man. This book starts out as what seems to be a standard first contact novel. A huge spaceship appears and orbits the moon, and centauroid aliens called the F'thk land in Washington D.C. and tell everyone that the Earth has the potential of joining a Galactic Commonwealth. But the protagonist of this story, science advisor Kyle Gustafson, is bothered by a multitude of little inconsistencies. And every time you think you have a handle on what is happening, Lerner shifts the story in a direction you just can't guess. A very fun read, and well worth your time and money. This story was serialized in Analog a couple of years ago, and I read it then. I just re-read it, and it was better than I remembered, and I thought it was good the first time.

Lerner reverses the standard SF viewpoint where humans show up and play with primitive alien's heads when an alien movie company drops in to make a film...though they forget to mention that detail to us. They wouldn't want us not act naturally, and who knows...we might not even want to star in a disaster movie. The central character is a science advisor that acts oddly for this genre, which is to say, he's smart, outspoken, and doesn't mind banging politicos heads together to get their attention. The action is fast and the plot twisty, and despite a truly off-putting cover (Doug Chaffee has done much better) this is a book I can happily recommend to fans of John Ringo, Jack McDevitt and other action oriented authors who are also good storytellers. It's the author's second book, and I've got to go back and read the first one (Probe). Ernest Lilley Editor - SFRevu.com