The Visitor: First Contact SF

I have just finished reading The Visitor. What an excellent book you have written. Your style of writing is very smooth, and very readable. You described characters enough to make me care about them. When they realized the first item was not from here, I was so happy for them. Discovering the 2nd actually gave me goosebumps. I so want this to be true. I had to put the book down when it came to the shooting...and step away for a while... as you might imagine , considering the news from Uvalde. But I did get back to it and finished. You got it so right, from the arrogance shown by some in the US, to the craziness of Evangelical thinking. With all the emotion here for the last few days, it didn't take much to bring a tear to my eye, and when Eve fell ill, I was so very sad. The ending was wonderful. How I wish it were possible. Thanks for a very, very good read.

I enjoyed most of the book, especially the practical day-to-day details of space operations and managing a major scientific facility. The philosophical discussions of technology versus religion were interesting to me, even if I had some disagreements. The major twist at the end was also a pretty good read. I was even OK with the various moralizing by humans and others. My problem with this book, as it is with many other sci-fi stories and techno-thrillers, is in the setups and plot devices used to move the story forward (and make it Anglicized). SPOILERS: A mid-30 year old, very specialized astronaut with a doctorate in Psychology, is one of two people to first contact an alien item, and is then almost instantly placed in charge of a major scientific facility, with a title of nobility and contact with world leaders. Extremely unbelievable. Then, after a major tragedy and terrible injuries, she is then placed in a dominant position in a massive international program, at a level with world leaders. Rubbish. The geopolitical aspects of the story (UN authority, military non-involvement) are very implausible, in order to push UK equality or superiority over the US, Russia, Europe, China, etc. Another nitpick for me, as an Engineer, are the ridiculously fast timeframes for the construction of space structures and spacecraft, and to incorporate new alien technologies into earthly endeavors. This is all too common in much of sci-fi and adventure literature, but it bugs me. Other readers may be able to get into the larger issues presented here, and ignore some of the more mundane unbelievable events.

I’ll try to do this without spoilers.Overall, the book was entertaining and kept my interest. The characters were believable, including realistic dialogue. The storyline was plausible: no superhuman heroes, no magical powers, no telepathy. The most unbelievable part of the story was that governments would actually spend money, lol.Some reviewers are complaining about “political correctness”. They must not realize that they are constantly manipulated by every company seeking to sell them a product! How something or someone is introduced to a person is significant in the attitude formed about it. The product or person then has to either live up to the hype or it flops.I see the small part of the book that recognizes our tendency (as a species) towards tribalism and judgement as an honest appraisal. If you are too sensitive about your beliefs for honest self introspection, this one part of the book might irritate you. To me, it was one part an examination of racism to four parts marketing psychology.My only real criticism of the book is that there was too little time and detail put to the development of the relationship between the two main characters as the story just skipped from the initial meeting to sociological impacts. I would have loved more dialogue!Some people may be offended by discussions about religion and religious beliefs. Again, I see this as this as a case of being too sensitive for introspection. If you can’t handle discussion about your beliefs without being offended, I don’t recommend this book for you.That said, I do recommend the book! It is not groundbreaking as a study of how we humans handle change, but it was an honest appraisal wrapped inside a good read.

I bought this on the basis of sterling reviews suggesting that this was a future classic. Well, I'm here to say that this is utter tosh and I only managed to drag myself wearily through half the book before I gave in to the wave of indifference that this induced in me.It starts off well enough but very quickly - in fact as soon as the alien object is located - twists into a book that runs at breakneck speed with no sense of build up or tension and worst of all an almost child like style. In fact I double checked to see if this was aimed at young teenagers not an adult market.It's just so banal.And even worse it's preachy. There is an excruciating part where the main character - I can't be bothered to remember her name - having discovered an actual alien photo, has to show this to assembled senior government people. In the run up we get every tired, snowflakey, cliche about other people and races delivered with the subtlety of an Antifa rally.In the end I just couldn't carry on and keep my dinner down.Avoid if you are over thirteen years old.

The first half of this novel sets up an interestingly fresh take on the First Contact scenario.What struck me about the writing though is that whilst the author is clearly knowledgeable regarding modern technologies and the space program, the writing style feels very dated. I was strongly reminded of John Wyndham whilst reading many of the passages. This feeling was reinforced when the occasional romantic interlude occurred. These scenes felt very awkward and clunky, with oddly stilted language from several decades ago.Despite this, the story was gripping in the first half and I was keen to keep reading. However, when the plot moved on to the 'visitor's' engagement with the human race, the whole thing turned into a rather tired and often encountered diatribe about the failings of people and nations, the fact that our technology has outpaced our moral and emotional development, and the usual observations about the illogical nature of religious faith.The ending was rather telegraphed. I won't include any spoilers here, but the fact that the story was told in the first person, inevitably flagged up what the conclusion had to be.All in all, a bit of a curate's egg of a book.

"The Visitor" by Tony Harmsworth contains some interesting SF ideas, such as "polarised electrons" and an alien-invented purely chemical fuel which seems to rival the energy density of nuclear power sources. However, since by "2034" the human race has, independently of any alien help, created autonomous express cars capable of traveling on public roads from Exeter to London at 200 MPH with no carbon footprint that's even mentioned, the real surprise is that the alien wonder fuel surprises anyone.Much of this books reads as a polemic on the evils of religion and the virtues of atheism, through the device of a wise atheist alien visitor who tells humanity the errors of its ways. This isn't an entirely new idea and, in the seventies, a popular actor called Stratford Johns wrote an entertaining book for teenagers along not dissimilar lines. When I've finished writing this review, the title of this will doubtless come back to me.Now, atheists, even alien ones, do not have beliefs but they do appear to have assumptions. In my experience of having worked with atheists I have found the assumptions of some of them to be not only awesomely groundless and firmly held, but often also casually belittling of non-atheists.I can allow myself one quote from the wise atheist alien without spoiling the book and especially the ending, for readers. This comes from the alien's keynote speech to the US Congress:"Only beings who have an irrational belief that life might not be irreplaceable, would be capable of destroying it."This is a very sweeping assumption and it's one which the author, at least at that point in the narrative, wants his readers to at least think about, if not accept as the atheist gospel. Let us give it a little thought, therefore.Four of the most powerful atheists of the 20th century were Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong and Pol Pot. (Pol Pot controlled only a small population, of eight million, but he controlled it very tightly indeed.) Possibly the most influential atheist of the 20th century not to hold political power was George Bernard Shaw. None of these five had "an irrational belief that life might not be irreplaceable." Therefore, according to the keynote sentence of the book's keynote speech, they ought to have been incapable of destroying life.Lenin "repeatedly emphasised the need for terror and violence in overthrowing the old order." He directly ordered, but never attended, the summary executions of anywhere from 10,000 to 150,000 people. He ordered an invasion of Poland in 1920 (which killed more of his own troops than Poles) and, most importantly, he ordered Stalin to confiscate grain from peasants, mainly but not exclusively in the Ukraine. This created a semi-accidental famine which killed much larger numbers of people that the mass executions or the war in Poland, a lesson which Stalin took to heart.When Stalin began to rule the Soviet Union in his own right, three entirely deliberate famines followed (there was one in the fifties), the Holodomor, which helped Stalin achieve the stupendous total of 30,000,000 murders. Stalin also launched, in close cooperation with Hitler, a second invasion of Poland, which was more successful than Lenin's effort. Once Mao Zedong had established avowedly atheist communist rule over mainland China, he expanded upon and refined Stalin's methods to murder something like 50,000,000 people. Li Rui wrote: "Mao's way of thinking and governing was terrifying. He put no value on human life. The death of others meant nothing to him." Pol Pot murdered somewhere between 1,500,000 and 2,700,000 people or around a quarter of the population of Cambodia, which made him, proportionately, the worst of the lot.George Bernard Shaw did not commit any direct acts of murder that I know of and he never wielded political power directly, either. But he abused his influence in the following way: In the 1920s he made and distributed a short film of himself delivering a monologue. In which, he called on "the men of science" to invent a poison gas that would painlessly kill all the unemployed, workshy and congenitally-handicapped people -including children- who were getting in the way of a socialist paradise. At the time, both Hitler and Stalin were proclaiming GBS as the great thinker of the day, and Hitler's new political party, the NAZIs, were looking for policies. The NAZIs went on to kill exactly the people GBS had listed for extermination, in exactly the way he recommended, using carbon-monoxide gas. Either in laboratory-like gas chambers using industrial cylinders of the gas (it is used in the steel industry to make steel plate hard on one side and springy on the other) or in buses adapted to feed exhaust fumes into the sealed-off passenger cabin. The child-victims thought they were going for a ride. Carbon monoxide poisoning is not pleasant (I know someone who narrowly survived a murder attempt by her husband) but it is nothing like as agonising as the cyanide gas that the NAZIs replaced it with to speed the process up when they got around to killing Jews and other racial groups. (Which was something GBS objected to, despite having provided the basic plan for genocide in his jolly little film.) Readers may not have seen this film: GBS's admirers don't want ANYONE to see it, so it's difficult to find these days.I repeat: none of these five people had a belief, rational or otherwise, that life might not be irreplaceable. But their belief in their own rationality was so unshakeable that they were not willing to let human lives, even tens of millions of them, stand between them and ordering the world in the way they wanted. Hitler, however, was not an atheist, nor was he the "Christian" that atheists and some Muslims claim him to be, because he ordered the desecration of every Christian altar in the Reich. He got Albert Speer and Heinrich Himmler to invent a neo-pagan religion for him, in which he may or may not have believed. At anyrate, the NAZI creed of the worker as God is remarkably similar to what GBS, as a Fabian, would have assumed if not believed.Pretending that violence is a sin unique to religious believers is not simply wrong or even evil: it is intellectually IDLE, given the accessibility of examples, as shown above, of total non-believers who committed violence on a genuinely unprecedented scale.

I concur with other reviewers that the author has injected into the story a political thread of 'political correctness' and other factors that skew the story line negatively. I won't repeat other reviewers as they have made that point well.I'd add that for a book supposedly set in a few years time, with autonomous cars and all that, the author's main character is an authoritarian managerial thug, controlling and confused at the same time and her behaviour is just unconvincing, and unrealistic (not even fantasy can rescue the story). I hope that in the future, we are not so in thrall of people with titles, Dame this or Sir that, or indeed rendered speechless by meeting the Prime Minister. This characterisation just drags the potentially serious story line into some bizarre case study of how not to manage people or be in a position of leadership.It is not a European story as some have said but a type of post-Brexit nostalgia novel of a England (yes I mean England) in the 1950s, but even novels from that period did not fall into this rabbit hole. Others may disagree with this perspective, of course.There is too much trivial dialogue in the story in order to set up the characters and their experience. I found this annoying, and not particularly well-written given the characters' flaws, and just drags the pages along without advancing character or story. So all you are left with is flipping pages, like skipping a meeting with toxic people, and indeed you actually are skipping meetings in the book!Given the ratings favour a higher number of stars than my two, the author may feel emboldened to write more in this manner. But like listening to a boring person at a dinner party, he should be careful not to overplay this.

I've not read a lot of first contact books, but I found this one to be compelling and certainly thought-provoking. Quite apart from the scientific side of the book, which seems well-researched and logically consistent, it acts as a stark mirror to show all that is wrong with humanity. It explores the idea (which I have long suspected) that humanity's technological prowess has far outgrown our emotional maturity, often with devastating effects.I found this a well-written book that drew me in and kept me wanting to read on, not knowing where it was going to end. It is set in the near-future, and there are nice little touches that made it seem quite realistic (like Scotland no longer being part of the UK, and the UK not being part of the EU after Brexit, although efforts were being made to rejoin). The characters are well-developed, but for me, this book was more of a social commentary on our society and how things could be done differently. The ending is entirely consistent with the rest of the book, and a satisfying one at that. More than anything, this book can be taken as a prompt for those in power to take a long hard look at themselves and ask why there is so much distrust, fear and hatred. But, precisely because those in power don't seem to have the capacity for self-reflection, this book will speak most loudly to those who, like me, who have long suspected that humanity, on the whole, is a flawed species, and is also still very primitive in so many ways.