lanya to Alanya begins when aliens called the Marq'ssan envelop Earth in what they call the Blanket—an electromagnetic pulse that destroys all but a scattering of the planet's electronic systems. At once, the human race is cast into a new Dark Age: power and water treatment facilities fail, food distribution falls apart, and the Internet shuts down. With no TV or other forms of entertainment and in many cases no work to occupy them, people become restless ... and soon they become violent, too.
Historian Kay Zeldin is caught in a riot in her home city of Seattle just minutes after the Blanket descends, finding herself on the wrong side of a very distressed police force. Soon, though, she is rescued by one of the most powerful men in the American government. The Marq'ssan are offering to restore some power and services to nations who send female diplomats to deal with them. It is the aliens' hope that humans can learn a gentler style of negotiation and interaction, one that will ultimately make Earth a good neighbor when Homo sapiens becomes a spacefaring race. Kay's old flame Robert Sedgewick—the arrogant head of U.S. internal security—has chosen her as one of three women who will represent the United States.
Kay hasn't seen Sedgewick for 20 years, and her memory of their past is deeply impaired—all she remembers is that it ended badly and that Sedgewick is dangerous, perhaps even unstable. But he insists that Kay is the country's only hope of successfully resisting the Marq'ssan, of learning who they are, what they want ... and—most importantly, since the U.S. has no intention whatsoever of changing the way it does business—how to strike back.
A kinder, gentler alien invasion
L. Timmel Duchamp is not the first feminist SF author to explore what might happen if benevolent aliens attempted to correct the excesses of humankind, but few of her predecessors have written a book so unflinchingly realistic about the chances of such an intervention succeeding. The Marq'ssan have fabulous powers, true, but changing human nature overnight is beyond them. The horrors that result when they try, in their idealistic, pacifist fashion, to impose their will on the headstrong U.S. government (as personified by Sedgewick) are appalling indeed.
Kay Zeldin is no simple, saintly heroine, either. She has ties to the system, shares the government's belief that the "aliens" are probably, in truth, human terrorists, and is often distracted from the ever-more-repressive measures ordered by Sedgewick against the U.S. population by a completely understandable desire to save her own neck. An extremely capable negotiator, she does significant damage to the alien cause by providing strong leadership for the female diplomats opposing the Marq'ssan agenda. All along, she is handicapped by the amnesia that prevents her from truly understanding what Sedgewick might be up to ... and what atrocities he might be capable of perpetrating in order to retain his grasp on power.
Alanya to Alanya is an intriguing mixture of SF genres and styles: It has utopian and dystopian elements, a strong splash of the political thriller, a good mystery subplot in Kay's amnesia, a hint of the sense of discovery that imbues first-contact novels and plenty to say about the current state of the real world. The first of a five-novel Marq'ssan cycle, it offers no easy answers to either its readers or its characters—though Kay ultimately works out where her loyalties lie, the aliens find themselves seriously challenged by humanity's intransigence. Some of this book's hardest questions—what fate does someone like Sedgewick deserve, for example, and how far should the aliens push their Intervention?—are left for later installments of the series.
Thought-provoking, suspenseful and entertaining, Alanya to Alanya does not quite stand on its own. Without knowing how the rest of the Marq'ssan Cycle will turn out, readers are left hoping for the best, but are given no reason to expect that events will come out well—for Kay or for the Earth.
