he world has been transformed by the unexplainable arrival of aliens called Foreigners, who walk among men in golden masks and robes, appearing and disappearing at will. They have brought the technological gift of Crystech, providing mankind both a building material and a pollution-free energy source. Communicating only through hand signals, they have solved humanity's technological and social problems, somehow causing mankind to turn away from its perennial strife to create a near-utopian future.
All the Foreigners ask in return is that human singers, called Sirens, give them well-paid private performances. For most people, their only fear is that the Foreigners might someday abandon mankind as mysteriously as they appeared.
Jack Perry is an officer with the Foreign Policy Police on New Venice, a luxurious artificial resort island in the Mediterranean that caters to Sirens and their Foreigner patrons. Jack returns from a visit to his native England to find that Sirens are being murdered, apparently along with their Foreigners. (No one knows whether Foreigners can really be killed; when seriously threatened, they merely disappear, leaving their gold masks, gloves and robes behind.)
Such murders have occurred once before on another resort island. Even though the murders were eventually traced to a secret organization of anti-Foreigner extremists, it was too late, as Foreigners abandoned the resort, leaving it bankrupt. With few police powers and no weapons, Jack and his fellow officers must solve the murders before the same thing happens to New Venice. If they fail, the same fate could await the rest of Earth as well.
A respectable SF murder mystery
The Foreigners is a solid addition to the honored subgenre of the science fiction murder mystery, very much in the tradition of Asimov’s Elijah Bailey robot stories. Jack Perry is an interesting and sympathetic protagonist, if sometimes a bit maddening in his tendency to be uncompromisingly and impractically ethical. Although the pace is a bit too slow in the middle of the book, the resolution to the murder mystery comes quickly and unpredictably.
Like Lovegrove’s other books, this one has a strong British flavor, which may explain why so little of his fiction is yet available in America. Readers used to fists-and-bullets American police stories might even find the lack of weaponry and coercive authority available to the Foreign Policy Police somewhat frustrating. Likewise, I suspect American readers might have trouble understanding why the mere appearance of the Foreigners would have such a pacifying effect on human nature, wiping out war and most crime throughout the world.
The novel is quite successful as a murder mystery, plus its future setting is interesting, and shows an optimism rare in SF by British authors. The Foreigners is less successful as science fiction, however. There is no sense of depth to Lovegrove’s handling of the Crystech technology being provided by the aliens. If humanity were provided such high technology, it would almost certainly create a scientific revolution, spurring scientists to develop a whole new generation of spinoff technologies. In Lovegrove’s book, all that happens is mass production of the technology as provided. It’s as if his future contains lots of engineers, but no scientists whatsoever.
Readers willing to accept technology as metaphor, however, and not demand hard-SF values, will find The Foreigners an engaging book.
