Review: Good, exciting, plausible story featuring Nuttall's usual good writing.
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 04 28, 2014
More like a 4.25.**SPOILER ALERT**Nuttall has written two other novels "A Learning Experience," in which several Earthmen with military training are abducted by none too bright aliens, turn the tables on them, and manage to kill them and to capture their ship, and "Invasion," about a billion aliens arriving with the intent to impose their version of religious truth on us and colonize us, and then there is Tobias Roote's  "The Pattern Ship" in which one Earthman, who has a metal plate in his skull fashioned from meteoric iron that contains an extremely rare and exotic element, crucial to an alien spaceman's repair of his ship, gains that man and humans access to space.  All books on the theme of how Earthmen--despite having no real space program or space ships--through luck or various improvised "Hail Mary" tactics (a la "Independence Day") gain access to space and such ships in time to prepare for or defeat attempted invasions/conquest by space faring aliens who have the capability to blackmail us planet-bound Earthmen, or to even destroy all human life on Earth, by simply dropping rocks on us from orbit.Despite an odd word choice or two, another good one from Nuttall, who is churning them out with, so far, little decrease in quality.I believe I've read somewhere that some government organization--NASA perhaps--commissioned a survey of First Contact stories and that, as envisioned by science fiction writers, in three out of every four such stories, things didn't turn out so well for us Earthmen.Given that the only examples we have to go on are our own earthly examples of First Contact between more advanced civilizations and less advanced civilizations that didn't go so well for the American Indians, the native Hawaiians, the Chinese, and many others, and given that, if they follow our pattern, any race that makes it to the top of their food chain and into a dominant position likely has a violent and aggressive bent, such pessimism is only to be expected.In this particular First Contact story red-eyed, snake-like, scaled aliens (some echoes of "V" here?) claim to be helpful, benevolent members of some sort of peaceful, advanced "Galactic Federation," but never disclose any specifics as to where they come from, how many of them their are on their 17 space ships, or on their home planet, how their particular society is run, or how they are governed.  Moreover, they also evade giving/refuse to give any details at all about any of the other thousands of intelligent species they claim to be members of this Galactic Federation; what star systems these thousands of other intelligent species might inhabit, details about what any of these other alien species societies are like, the names of these different alien species, or even what one of these other alien species might look like.The Aliens make all sorts of promises of access to Space and a new Golden Age to come, dispense a few economically destabilizing technological items, manipulate public opinion, indulge in all sorts of undermining economic activities, engage in world-wide, deep, hacking and bugging, in assassinations of critics, and capture and physically modify the brains of people in critical positions of power to make them into easily controllable if permanently damaged slaves, all the while loftily lecturing us poor benighted Earthmen that only if we blood-thirsty, unstable, and vicious barbarians disband our militaries and surrender control to them can they guide us along the path to peace, prosperity, stability, and "membership."What they are trying to hide is the fact that their 17 ships in orbit--only one of them a battleship--are only the crippled, lost, marooned remnants of a far larger, predatory invasion fleet, and they are hoping their major con job will allow them to take over the industrially advanced nations of the Earth so that, eventually, under their control and direction they will be able to produce the high technology items necessary to repair their ships.Could this happen?Could Earthmen be so stupid and unperceptive in the face of so many evasions and such an obvious con job?With the implied threat of ships in orbit and able to hurl rocks i.e. "hyper kinetic missiles" having the destructive power of nuclear weapons at us, I'm afraid I think that given the scenario Nuttall presents, as he writes, we would see the mob, would see millions of demonstrators howling in the street, begging for the aliens to lead us into the new Golden Age, and see governments largely folding rather than be denied the technological and economic advances that would only be given to those countries that acceded to the alien's terms for membership in their fictitious Galactic Federation.