Review: A generally well-written, exciting, pretty plausable alien invasion trilogy.
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 09 8, 2013
More like a 3.75 for a plot line just left hanging.**SPOILER ALERT**This usually very well-written and exciting trilogy has the distinct advantage of a story line that seems to me to be very plausible in terms of how we would react and had the capability to react to technologically advanced and ruthless aliens.A billion desperate, genetically engineered, relatively emotionless refugees/settlers from an almost hive-like, caste-based society, having a totally different viewpoint and morality from us, show up on our doorstep in a gigantic, played-out mother ship, asking for our help; Aliens who initially promised us access to their superior technology, saying it would lead to a new era of peace and plenty.  But, we almost immediately discovered that their real intention was to colonize the entire Earth, to uproot, displace, and to push us to the side, to use us as slaves and perhaps, eventually, to exterminate us, creating alien-human hybrids to replace us, meanwhile releasing their ecology's plants and animals into our native environment to permanently change our ecology into one more suited to their needs.The basic story line is somewhat reminiscent of the TV series "Alien Nation," except that in that series the desperate aliens--mostly slaves and a few masters--whose crippled ship crash landed in our Southwest, numbered in the thousands, and although provoking all sorts of cultural problems and changes, were not so great a threat to our existence, and looked like they could probably be successfully dealt with.My one quarrel with this trilogy is that a fair amount of storytelling was used to create one major story line that was set up but never mentioned thereafter. Nuttall wrote of a young computer genius who had gotten enough understanding of the alien's complex, very advanced computers sufficient to let him hack into their systems to accomplish all sorts of sabotage for the Resistance.  Of how--at great risk to himself and the Resistance--he was smuggled into the ruins of Washington, D.C., the center of the Aliens world control apparatus, and set up with some computers, and a fake ID in a pretty safe apartment to do his thing.  Then, nothing,  Although control over the Alien's computer systems was a key part of the plot and mentioned several times thereafter, he and his capabilities and role were never mentioned again.Somewhere I read that, I guess it was NASA, had commissioned a study of what Science Fiction writers had imagined would be the results from first contacts with aliens, and by something like three to one the outcomes for us were usually bad.Science Fiction gives us a laboratory to do all sorts of "thought experiments," to explore what could possibly happen and how we would react to/cope with a First Contact situation,  and such "what if" speculating could well be of great value if and when such a contact does happen.In fact, I have read that some in the UFO community speculate that the government is deliberately encouraging such SF explorations and images of first contact stories and scenarios for the purpose of accustoming  us to the idea of the existence of aliens so that, when the government finally admits/reveals that such aliens do in fact exist, the reactions to and repercussions from that revelation will be much less severe than they would otherwise have been in an unprepared and oblivious population.