ne day, the president of the United States wakes up to find that practically overnight, the town of Kennewick, Wash., has been invaded. A group of aliens calling themselves the Minervans have built a colony there, some 1 million strong. The Minervans are genetically identical with humans, representing themselves as lost Homo sapiens ancestors returned to their old stomping grounds. But in all other respects, the Minervans are completely unlike Earthlings. They possess sophisticated technologies and psionic powers; they worship a goddess and constitute a matriarchy. But they have no imperialistic goals, being themselves refugees from a war between the Western, Central and Eastern Galactic Empires. They simply wish to live in peace and help mankind.
Naturally, such altruistic, utopian motives do not sit well with the president and his advisors, who are all uniformly corrupt and literally deranged. Their first act is to launch a sneak attack with what they believe to be an overwhelming force. Needless to say, the Earth assault is completely frustrated by the Minervans. During the massacre, one of the aliens, a priestess named Aurora, happens to capture a soldier named Andrew Hamilton. Aurora intends to use Hamilton as a lab rat, to find out what makes Earthlings tick. Their relationship starts out as that of master and slave, but over the course of the story will invert, then recrystallize as friendship.
Meanwhile, the president and his cronies, still lusting to reclaim the "holy land" of Kennewick, have begun to play Machiavellian games among the star empires. Subverting galactic diplomats and arranging to sell off Earth's precious resources to gain "bluebucks," the galactic currency, they are soon filling the spaceways with Terran terrorists, who manage to send some suns nova, incinerating a few imperial worlds. Angered at this human impudence, part of the enormous fleet of the Western Galactic Empire—"one hundred billion interstellar battleships and a hundred trillion space marines"—arrives in Earth orbit with the reigning Princess Minaphera onboard. Her judgment will determine if Earth survives. But first, a royal interview with Aurora and her pet human Hamilton is in order.
A Swift-inspired black-humored satire
Best known for his nonfiction, such as The Case for Mars (1997), Robert Zubrin here offers us a work that fits neatly into a long tradition within the SF genre, that of the satirical tale of the skewed present or near-future. Swift and Voltaire spring to mind as early prototypes, of course, and Zubrin aspires to be as grimly scathing as, say, Swift's "A Modest Proposal." But while his aim is commendably high, when it comes to the execution of his tale and the insights he has to deliver, he fails to reach the empyrean heights of his models. This book is rather like a blend of William Tenn, Harry Harrison, Robert Sheckley, Ron Goulart, Christopher Anvil and Keith Laumer, but weakened by its second- or third-generation status.
It's not that Zubrin is deficient on a sentence-by-sentence level. The book is easy reading. His prose is transparent and limns each scene sufficiently. But there's little real zip or zest to his language. It's all rather fast-food and obvious. Structurally, the novel is OK. The book starts with a bang, no prelude or needless scene-setting, and then moves along in a sprightly manner. Zubrin's dialogue—when it's not deliberately absurd—sounds as if it would actually issue from the mouths of human beings. And the overall structure of the book reveals a neat mirror-imaging in the role reversal between Aurora and Hamilton.
But problems arise when we come right down to meat of the novel. What is Zubrin trying to tell or show us? Power corrupts? Mobs are dangerous? "Superior" cultures shouldn't be so quick to judge "inferior" ones? (Allegories with the current war on terrorism and Homeland Security Act are plentiful throughout.) The battle of the sexes is eternal? These are all commonplaces, and seeing these truisms illustrated with second-hand alien empires does not add to their fascination. Additionally, Aurora's Michael-Valentine-Smith-style commentary on humanity's failings lacks any of Heinlein's acuity or charm.
