ester Ordway, a rather nebbishy chap, has one simple dream in his middle-aged life: to discover a new species of insect and have it named after him. While walking in a New York state park one day, he does precisely that. Or rather, the insect discovers him. For this bug is not natural, but the artificial nanotech harbinger of an alien invasion. It zeroes in on Lester's skull and begins to probe his mind, rendering him semi-catatonic.
Rushed to an emergency room still clutching his minuscule assailant, which he managed to grab before falling unconscious, Lester has the good fortune to fall in with a med-tech named Pilar Ramirez. Pilar herself, as well as several other people in the hospital, is soon sharing Lester's troubles in modified form, as the alien insect fissions and attacks her as well. But only Pilar emerges from the experience determined to help Lester get to the bottom of his misfortune.
Calling on the scientific skills of one of Lester's friends, Dr. Maybelle Terwilliger, the trio begins to formulate some hypotheses and get a glimmering of what they are facing. Enlisting a nanotech specialist, Maybelle's grandson, Dan Felder, the quartet are soon hot on the trail of the plague of invaders, despite a lack of interest from government and hospital officials. So sharp are the amateur investigators that Pilar merits a visit from an uncanny human simulacrum who attempts to kill her.
By this point, however, even the stodgy government cannot deny that something strange is afoot. The foursome are brought to a secure government installation, where they meet the president and a group of military men, experts all. Our heroes have been drafted to fight a battle whose outlines are murky but suggestive of deadly danger. As the new team strives to put the puzzle pieces together, they are finally contacted by the agent behind the mystery. An alien named Xiphar, in orbit with his comrades, is intent on studying the Earth without interference. Humans must cease their prying, or suffer the consequences.
Actions and consequences mount on both sides, with only Pilar offering an alternative to the escalating violence. But even a last-minute breakthrough in empathy between Pilar and Xiphar is not sufficient to stop President Hwang from unleashing Armageddon.
A quiet, mild-mannered throwback
Consider, for a moment, such state-of-the-art alien invasion novels as Gregory Benford's Eater (2000). Generally, such SF novels nowadays feature ultra-weird threats of cosmological magnitude, widescreen effects and lots of thriller-style sex and realpolitik. They're practically SFX-laden disaster spectacles waiting to be filmed.
Stanley Schmidt's new novel, his fifth and his first in 16 years (Schmidt's main job is editing Analog magazine, which he's helmed since 1978), is nothing like this. It's a kind of quiet, mild-mannered, deliberately slow-paced throwback to the days of, say, Raymond F. Jones or Frederic Brown (think of Brown's "The Waveries" as a kind of template for tone and pacing). Events move gradually, the characters are old-fashioned, and the ultimate revelation of the nature of Xiphar is straight out of an episode of Star Trek, circa 1966.
When I say Schmidt's cast is old-fashioned, I'm referring to their interpersonal dynamics and basic personalities. Think Angela Lansbury as Maybelle Terwilliger; Marisa Tomei as Pilar Ramirez, Cliff Robertson with 20 years shaved off as Lester Ordway, and maybe, for a hint of wildness, Tim Allen as Dan Felder. With a lineup like this, a kind of Alien Invasion, She Wrote atmosphere insures that no great terrors or passions will overwhelm anyone. For instance, here's the maximum excitement Schmidt conjures as Pilar and Lester escape from a threat through an abandoned subway emergency exit: "They were able to pick their way up without impaling themselves on any tetanus-bearing artifacts."
Still and all, Schmidt does manage to engender some sympathy for the original trio, all of whom have their lives deranged by the government response to Xiphar. He keeps the story rolling along at its sedate clip, his authorial voice a beacon of let's-all-calm-down-and-things-will-be-fine reasonableness. He also provides some intriguing speculations in the area of nanotech. His notion of explorers seeding a planet with myriad small insectile probes is straight out of cyberneticist Rodney Brooks' daydreams. Unfortunately, the book opens up to truly cosmic proportions only in its final pages, resembling what Jerry Oltion did in the opening pages of The Getaway Special.
