Review: This is a great approach to the FIrst Contact genre
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 10 7, 2013
I love first contact stories, particularly ones that are set in our own time.  Xenophobia is such a novel.The author did a fabulous job of imagining Earth's first contact through a main plot that has little to do with the aliens.  The characters are innocently caught up in a Somali-style civil war, trying to survive the senseless slaughter brought by a local anti-American war lord upon the weak.  The main characters only hear bits and pieces of news about the arrival of an alien space ship, but they're so busy trying just to survive that they aren't able to sort out how the news is affecting the rest of the world.  This first part of the story was masterfully written as the author doesn't approach the aliens' arrival straight on as nearly every other novel seems to do.When the main characters' journey intersects directly with the aliens, things get very interesting and the real genius of this story begins to emerge.  The author uses the moral, ethical and superstitious weaknesses of humanity as a canvas for creating a very realistic look into the probable disaster that would befall Earth's first contact situation.  Where many novels try to paint a first contact situation as either an event that brings great gifts to humanity, or brings war and devastation to Earth, Mr. Cawdron uses the story to simply show us very clearly that our civilization isn't nearly ready for such a thing.  Not because we lack the weapons to defeat a massively superior new enemy, but because we're very likely to screw up the most amazing opportunity ever presented to our species.  Mr. Cawdron's focus isn't the aliens -- it's us.This is a great addition to the first contact genre -- I'd put it in my top five.  It was very very hard to put down and offered a lot of fresh food for thought.  This wasn't just a chunk of brain-candy for geeks.  It's an intelligent look at humanity.  It's a naked look at how completely unprepared we really are to meet our neighbors.(One final point: I really appreciate the care Mr. Cawdron took with copy editing to ensure that the grammar was correct and that words were not misspelled.  To a dyslexic reader like me, misspellings and poor grammar are terribly disruptive -- we can't just read over them and continue.  This book is uncommonly well edited.  I appreciate that!)