This is Absolutely the Best Science Fiction Book I’ve Read in Ages – has Aliens and Surprising Catastrophes – Terrific Ending #review #bookreview #scifi #books #giftideas #giftidea
[image error]I’m an incorrigible skimmer, but I read every word of Tomorrow’s Kin by Nancy Kess. The story begins with aliens who have a surprising link to Earth. They’ve already landed when middle-aged geneticist Marianne Jenner is summoned. She joins a team of earthly scientists working with the aliens to defeat a lethal danger that threatens both humans and extraterrestrials – a cloud of interstellar spores that could wipe out both worlds.
Nothing goes the way I expected. Disaster is slow and complicated, driven as much by human failings as the interstellar threat, with a fascinating impact on Earth and its children. It’s a good story – a global calamity told from the intimate perspective of Marianne and her family, with a chance to follow the aliens to their home world. There are action scenes, but a lot of the story covers Marianne’s relationships, so that’s my one caveat if you’re not into that. In addition to planet-wide impacts, climate change is raging, which is not related to the main plot but adds some colorful background.
In the latter half of the book, young children told some of the story from their point of view. Those sections were handled wonderfully. The kids notice exactly what a kid would, leaving me with more meaning than the children realize themselves. Kess occasionally drops names from science and the arts (Stephen Hawking, Melville’s Ahab), which is fun. I enjoyed the references I recognized, but none was vital to the story so they never slowed me down.
I liked both the science and the characters – lengthy personal interactions related to the overall story and held my interest. The rip-roaring climax was surprising, but all made sense in the end. It’s a good thing I finished the book on a weekend because I couldn’t put it down through the last quarter of the book.
What others are saying
With 3.5 stars on Amazon and 24 reviews, the book isn’t as popular as I expected. The alien potion of the book is based on an award-winning novella by Kess (one reviewer said “word for word”), and some readers were disappointed that the aliens left the story early in the book. The effects of the alien’s visit on individuals was belabored for some, too much like “filler.” Others loved both premise and characters. As is common, the features of the book that delighted some readers were exactly what others disliked.
Book Two in the trilogy is available now, though there were no reader reviews on Amazon when I checked. The description seemed a little disappointing – sounded like a rework of the original book’s plot.
Filed under: Science Fiction Tagged: aliens visit Earth, book review, extraterrestrial physics, interstellar danger, science fiction, SciFi, spaceship
