Clearly, the time is ripe for such a fantastic sci-fi book honed with political satire. After the Spiders of Allah and Cronix, I didn’t quite know what to expect from James Hider. This was superb! Ripe is set in modern Edinburgh and Washington DC and Moscow plus rural Virginia and France, and the time frame goes from pre-Roman times to a not-so-distant future. That’s when the alien Maut overlords are due to show up and harvest volunteer humans in order to bio-tweak their artificial intel. Weird hierarchies abound. Turns out, some aliens were already here! Human and supra-humans interact in a scarily convincing way, both in the flesh and online. We follow a psychiatrist, her patient, a newspaper reporter and small town editor, military vets, a trucker, and politicians of all stripes just as the end of times for Earthlings becomes overdue ---well, everywhere except a possible sanctuary in Hawaii. By the time half of Earth’s urban population disappears, the chaos is inescapable. Hider describes it well:
"Not only was military discipline shot, but civilization itself was gone, collapsed not with a bang or a whimper, but with a president of the United States getting French-kissed by some extraterrestrial bug. " To avoid spoilers, I will say no more. You'll be grabbed by this tale.