Customer Reviews

Earth Has Been Found

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With the strange occurrences of: lost people in and around the Bermuda Triangle; the strange paintings on the walls of pyramids all over the world; the strange designs seen from the sky looking back at field or landscapes make you wonder are we alone. One could ask have we been visited before and are we still being visited or studied. What if we are not being visited on purpose, what if just a natural phenomenon that we are not aware of is opening a pathway between our world and another dimension. Or a worm hole opening and closing while connecting worlds that may be light years apart. "Earth Has Been Found" opens all these possibilities and then throws a alien life form that adapts itself to earth so well that man finds his very existence threatened.

The alien is not interested in communicating with man it only follows its instincts. Man on the other hand is in a hurry to find out as much as he can about his new found rival for planet dominance. The ending must be thought about and reflected on and then you will realize cleaverness of the writer in coming to that particular ending.

I've read all of DF Jones end-of-civilization novels, starting with the extremely dreadful "Colossus Forbin Project" (the film adaption is immeasurably better, just as "The Graduate" film was known for improving upon it's source). Of all his books, "Earth Has Been Found" is by far the most entertaining, filled with impending doom and fascinating sci-fi ideas. Jones usually takes a simple hypothesis and follows it to it's logical conclusion. In this case, what if some minor alien pest was accidentally left on our planet? It happens all the time when people travel, accidentally taking along a plant or pest to another part of the globe which eventually decimates plants or animals that have no evolutionary resistance. In this novel, each time the protagonists think they have a handle on the situation, the author turns the screw again. While there are many similarities to "Andromeda Strain," the creepy, grim plot reminds me more of John Campbell's classic "Who goes there?" which both "The Thing" films were based on.

The book is bracketed by a brief prolog & epilog from someone in the future, the same literary device used in "Monkey Planet" (aka "Planet of the Apes"). Naturally it has the same effect - to quickly extrapolate what kind of sociological result has occurred since the main story has taken place. Jones sees civilization as a thin mask hiding the primitive in humans - whether it's about women being sex-bimbos or people holding godlike awe to anything they don't understand and believe to be superior to them. The latter boils down to being superstitious. He foresees the end result of the novel's unnatural catastrophe to be a pragmatic but dogmatic religious dictatorship. Would a modern skeptical world see a predatory extraterrestrial as God's wrath? There are fundamentalist minorities in the West which see every event as heaven sent; non-secular governments elsewhere; and conservative religious movements using violence to radically change (or take over a destabilized) society. This outcome seems quite possible, though it doesn't have much to do with the bulk of the novel (the alien pest infestation).

One annoying drawback throughout all of Jones' novels is his persistent depiction of women as conniving sex-bimbos, except for a couple older women (the implication being that post-menopausal women are no longer dominated by hormones and can become thinkers and doers like men). Ironically, the reader needs to suspend disbelief more for his female characters than for his monsters.

If one can tolerate the simplistic female characterization, the novel remains a very unnerving story that unfolds with a grim inevitability, and remains effective in later re-readings. One of my favorite books.

This work not only delivers a plot of world mayhem through an invading force of creatures, but it begs the reader to ponder the theological implications such things pose. The author cites an example of some 'entity' pulling airplanes from time and space as we know it such as we would grab a ladybug from a bush and then replacing it, possibly infecting it with some parasite just as the planes became infected with Xenos. The question it asks is that if we are not alone, who, or what, else is with us, causing this collision of worlds?

I've read all of DF Jones end-of-civilization novels, starting with the extremely dreadful "Colossus Forbin Project" (the film adaption is immeasurably better, just as "The Graduate" film was known for improving upon it's source). Of all his books, "Earth Has Been Found" is by far the most entertaining, filled with impending doom and fascinating sci-fi ideas. Jones usually takes a simple hypothesis and follows it to it's logical conclusion. In this case, what if some minor alien pest was accidentally left on our planet? It happens all the time when people travel, accidentally taking along a plant or pest to another part of the globe which eventually decimates plants or animals that have no evolutionary resistance. In this novel, each time the protagonists think they have a handle on the situation, the author turns the screw again. While there are many similarities to "Andromeda Strain," the creepy, grim plot reminds me more of John Campbell's classic "Who goes there?" which both "The Thing" films were based on.

The book is bracketed by a brief prolog & epilog from someone in the future, the same literary device used in "Monkey Planet" (aka "Planet of the Apes"). Naturally it has the same effect - to quickly extrapolate what kind of sociological result has occurred since the main story has taken place. Jones sees civilization as a thin mask hiding the primitive in humans - whether it's about women being sex-bimbos or people holding godlike awe to anything they don't understand and believe to be superior to them. The latter boils down to being superstitious. He foresees the end result of the novel's unnatural catastrophe to be a pragmatic but dogmatic religious dictatorship. Would a modern skeptical world see a predatory extraterrestrial as God's wrath? There are fundamentalist minorities in the West which see every event as heaven sent; non-secular governments elsewhere; and conservative religious movements using violence to radically change (or take over a destabilized) society. This outcome seems quite possible, though it doesn't have much to do with the bulk of the novel (the alien pest infestation).

One annoying drawback throughout all of Jones' novels is his persistent depiction of women as conniving sex-bimbos, except for a couple older women (the implication being that post-menopausal women are no longer dominated by hormones and can become thinkers and doers like men). Ironically, the reader needs to suspend disbelief more for his female characters than for his monsters.

If one can tolerate the simplistic female characterization, the novel remains a very unnerving story that unfolds with a grim inevitability, and remains effective in later re-readings. One of my favorite books.