Anachronisms

Rating:
Summary: Anachronisms
Review: The four-star review is mainly an indicator to people who like trad SF which features stories about monsters invading spaceships. That's really all this book is...though it is well done. Well-done--hardly rare--meaning medium enjoyment.

Your standard spaceship, crewed by eight humans who just want to wrap up a science expedition and head home, land on your standard barren planet, and pick up your, well, not-so-standard hostile alien. Besides the alien being something mercifully different, the author does exert himself to find new angles to this oft-repeated story.

First, we have two unusual crewmembers. One is a gifted psionic named Mars Lea; another is named Jonomy, and he is jacked right into the spaceship's main computer via a cable sunk into his forehead.

Second, and more important to the novel's overall feel, even though the creature brought on board is the obvious suspect, as things fall into chaos and it looks like everyone is going to die, it's actually hard to tell what's behind it all. If the creature is manipulating people's minds, causing them to become irrational, where is it, because it's original form is dead (aha, what movie are you likening this to, by now!)? If Mars Lea's telempathic powers are affecting everyone, does she know about it, is she going insane, or is she being manipulated by an outside force? If the onboard computer is going slowly berserk, causing robots and "sentinel" security drones to become dangerous, why is that happening in tandem with the psionic anomalies? If Jonomy is losing his mind...again, is that caused by an alien presence, Mars Lea's descent into psychic entropy, or the computer somehow being invaded or just malfunctioning?

The danger comes from all sides. Paranoia becomes an exception to all the rules. Soon, nothing and no one can be trusted. Things come to a crisis situation when Jonomy seems unwilling to disconnect himself from the ship's vital systems, though there is compelling evidence that he is behind the breakdown of, uh, everything. He insists, at laser-point, that he is the only thing keeping the ship's computer from being totally corrupted by an invading presence. Meanwhile, Mars Lea is sliding into a terrifiying psychic universe...

Unlike in the film called Alien, it is the ship's captain, Ericho, who must steel himself and try to save the ship. And when all is finally revealed, the malevolent presence in the background does have quite a different agenda than eating or cocooning humans. Still, fans of the Alien films--plus anything from 2001: A Space Odyssey, to the Star Trek stories like Day of the Dove, or Wolf in the Fold--would likely derive high enjoyment from this book. Everyone else would probably see this more as three-star trad SF.