Alien Perspective

by David Houston

A deadly disease has killed off all aboard an alien spacecraft except a handful of survivors sealed within the inner command sphere. The design of the craft makes it impossible for the aliens to get out or for aid to reach them without spreading the contagion. Finding themselves in the vicinity of Earth, but totally unfamiliar with the planet, the aliens decide to land and seek help.

On Earth, politicians, scientists, and the military, unaware of the aliens' predicament, argue over how to receive their visitors from space.

Genres: Science Fiction

Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1978

Reviews

[Nathan Shumate · Rating 3 out of 5]

My three-star rating is an average of several above-average elements and below-average ones.

- Above average: A 1978 novel predicts both color LCD screens, and portable phones. Especially with the latter, it's treated as a normal fact of life, eg., someone checks his shirt pocket before he leaves a room to make sure he remembered his phone.

- Above average: The aliens are designed to be, well, *alien.*

- Below average: ...but the aliens still end up being too comprehensible to modern western man. (This is, by the way, the complaint I have with almost all Robert J. Sawyer novels: The aliens, with utterly divergent biology, are still psychologically human.) Especially given the indications of the aliens' entirely different conception of gender and their complete devotion to democracy even as a reality-determining process, I had hoped for some gentle exposition that explored this.

- Too many unresolved plot threads, or ones with are solved almost off-handedly after having been dwelt on for chapters.

- The aliens and humans never actually meet -- there are fragmentary broadcast discussions hampered by the crudity of translation, but it's never any real sort of "encounter" with the alien.

[Craig Jones · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very few of the books that I read almost 40 years ago have enough staying power for me to remember much about them. This is a rare exception. One glance at the cover and I'm instantly picturing the five main (compelling) characters and a dozen of their key scenes. It's quite a blast from the past. Most of all, I remember how powerfully compelling Houston made the premise of the story, a black-box puzzle of epic proportions, and then carried it off.

I'm not sure, but I think this was David Houston's debut novel (or second at most), but I was already a fan of his work as one of the founders of Starlog magazine. So, I was not at all surprised that his novel held up to the standards of my usual fare at the time (Robert Heinlein, Larry Niven, David Gerald, et. al.). I rarely re-read novels, but this one's going back into my to-read stack.

[Dave Clements · Rating 4 out of 5]

I quite liked how the story was told from 3 different perspectives and how each of those three groups only slowly came to understand what was going on with the other two.

[Rob Markley · Rating 3 out of 5]

Wasn't too bad - probably better than the average rating