Customer Reviews

The quiet invasion

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I devoured this book. It's rare to find a writer who is so adept at inventing new civilizations with large and *interesting* casts of characters. Kettel kept me riveted to this novel of first contact with a race so different and so unique from Humans that I expected a lot more than I got at the novel's end.

In Quiet Invasion, the Humans have colonized Venus and discover that someone else got there first. Factions on Earth want to interfere with the Venusian colonists and the politics behind the Earth's world government and those on Venus made this fascinating reading. Kettel also delves into the dying world of the aliens (called The People) and as different as they are, there are also some basic commonalities with our race.

After all this tremendous buildup, Kettel totally disappointed me by story's end. Several storylines are unresolved and while one alien makes the ultimate sacrifice to help the humans, you have to wonder why the villain gets away with murder.

Kettel is a promising writer with tons of potential, but she needs to learn how to deliver the goods. If being ultimately disappointed does not bother you, then by all means, you should read this book. Otherwise, don't waste your time.

Dr. Helen Failia is the founder of Venera, an orbital city designed to provide a research base for investigating Venus. But, things are going sour, and it seems that Venera will not be around for long. Ambassador T'sha is a leader of an alien people whose world is dying. They need a new home, and have found one...Venus. This is a story of misunderstanding between people, and the quest for understanding by some and for results by others.

This book should have been a great book, but for some reason it is not. The author simply introduces the aliens, but does not describe them; I found myself constantly trying to understand what they even looked like. The story dragged on, while the storyline took turn after turn. I think that this book would have benefited from being simplified and shortened.

Overall I do think this was a good book, but not more than that. I don't recommend it.

I read about one-third of The Quiet Invasion and finally decided I didn't enjoy it enough to finish it. I think the author did a phenomenal job of creating a thoroughly alien personality. The book alternates between chapters written from a human's viewpoint and ones written from the alien's viewpoint. The alien is an interesting being, and one with values we can relate to. But I noticed that the passages about the alien would bog me down trying to understand the alien's thought processes and figuring out how the alien would be affected by the things it was seeing. So the great job the author did in creating this alien creature also disrupted the flow of the story in a serious way and created a major character whose thought processes are somewhat inscrutable. I think one of the jobs of an author is to put us in the minds of the characters. The author understands this, and does a fairly good job of putting us inside the mind of this alien. But this alien's world and motivating influences are so different from our own that being inside the alien's mind is bewildering. The author probably had everything worked out well in her own mind so that these passages are self-consistent, but that is not the same thing as relating things clearly to the readers. I think this was not done well, and for me, the book suffers greatly from it.

The other big drawback of the book is that the writing is somehow immature. Some of the characters are older and quite experienced, but their characters do not reflect their age at all. All of the human characters as far as I read seem to share the same levels of energy and the same strengths of their convictions, and are affected similarly by failures and successes. In real life people are widely diverse in these things. The story was pretty interesting, but the sameness of the characters made them too unreal to draw me in. Some people won't care much about this, and if you are intrigued by the story line you may enjoy the book. But if you look for real people in your reading, you will be disappointed. I am sure the author will continue to develop, and future books may not suffer from these problems. And she deserves recognition now for creating a marvelously alien character and culture. But I think it takes more than this to make a great book. I will look forward to better from her in the future, but I do not highly recommend The Quiet Invasion.

This story of first contact leaves much to be desired. Our initial introduction to The People is not very clear. I had a hard time understanding what the aliens looked like, how they moved and what their interaction is with their cities and machines. At first I thought they were butterflies; later they were described as jellyfish. I must say, however, that once the initial confusion was dissipated, I found the interaction between The People and their living cities quite interesting.

I just couldn't get myself to like most of the main characters. Dr Helen Falia, Grace, Veronica Hatch, and the others were all very flawed. Everyone had hidden agendas and were very self-centered. I couldn't find myself pulling for any of them.

The parallel stories of political infighting within both cultures did not develop the sence of crisis that I expected. I kept hoping for more depth in the book and did not get it.

There were glimmers of brilliance in this book. Unfortunately, they were few in number and short in duration.

Maintaining the high standards she set with "Fool's War" and "Playing God," Sarah Zettel's "The Quiet Invasion" is a very good hard SF book that doesn't skimp on characterization and good writing. In each of her books, she develops a well-realized alien race, and the People in this book - aliens who feel right at home on the blazing surface of Venus - are her best invention yet. Where the Dedelphi in "Playing God" occasionally seemed (and acted) like humans in alien suits, Zettle has taken care to make the People's culture in this book quite different from human, to the point where the two races sometimes have no matching cultural referents. In other words, sometimes her aliens are truly alien, and it's a rare SF author that can pull that off.

There are a few plot holes, and some loose ends that I would have liked to see tied up. But I enjoyed this book a lot. If you're a fan of hard SF, but not so hard that it clanks and whirrs, it's worth spending your money on "The Quiet Invasion." Sarah Zettle has definitely won a place on my coveted "Buy Everything This Author Writes" List.

Kinda silly alien\human contact story. It was particulary difficult to get into the long winded interactions of the weird aliens. Trying to remember alien names is a pain. Who was the bad guy? Who was the good guy? Who cares. How does a biological based creature survive the extreme atmosphere of Venus without artificial protection? What did these aliens evolve in an acid pressure cooker? I think a brief explanation of how that might have come about would have helped. But, it wasn't a total wash. Not the best, but interesting enough that I finished it. Okay, that's it.

Sarah Zettel's "The Quiet Invasion" is a mixed blessing, with some fine writing and ideas mixed with poor plot devices.

On the writing front, the words have a very smooth flow. With some authors, clunky wording distracts from the plot. The characters are quite three-dimensional.

Despite the fine writing, I found the story dragging from time to time. I eventually realized that this was due to the many detailed character flashbacks, a technique that helped define a character while bringing the plot to a standstill. It happens over and over throughout the book draining a lot of momentum from the story.

The plot seemed rather forced at many points. I can't give many examples without giving away parts of the story, but often characters take actions that seem rather irrational. This includes the aliens.

One example that might not give away too much: The aliens have a system of "promises" -- debts incurred for favors. One alien offers another the indenture of any of his future children, even though he currently doesn't even have a wife and even though the promise may make it harder to obtain a wife and thus fulfill the promise. For this rather empty promise, he receives a "blank check" from the other alien, a deciding vote on a significant matter for which the second alien does not have all the facts (and knows it).

Another example is found at the very end of the story, where a supposedly highly perceptive character is revealed to have originated a very stupid plan.

I was also uncomfortable with a lot of the "science" in this book. The surface of Venus is 855° F (457° C) with a surface pressure of 90 atmospheres. The characters can not only travel on the surface, but can don Venus-suits which allow them to walk on the surface. The vehicles and suits seemed rather inadequate for the purpose and few details were given.

This environment is supposedly comfortable for the aliens. Again, few details were given to support a metabolism that could function well at this high temperature. In one scene, an alien comments on Earth, a world so cold that substances appear in liquid form, something apparently unusual to them. Yet at 855°, the aliens must have some liquids in their environment, even if they are only molten metal. This doesn't encourage confidence in the author's technical abilities.

The tedious character flashbacks, the forced plot devices and the scientific weakness of the story create constant irritations with the book. Yet the writing is so smooth and the characters so solid (even without the flashbacks), that one is left feeling that the author has a lot of potential. She may require a much more critical editor to achieve her best work.

Helen Failia has almost singlehandedly created Venera, a scientific research base in the atmosphere of Venus, but as with so many research facilities, its survival hinges on precarious funding. Meanwhile, aliens who call themselves "The People" are looking into colonizing the planet-to them, its hot, high-pressure atmosphere provides a haven from their dying planet. But The People have environmentalism almost instinctively drilled into them, and the presence of humans gives them cause to stay away.

After a dramatic first encounter, conflicts rage on both sides: the pragmatic representatives of The People want to take what is theirs and to hell with the humans, who (without the ecological sensitivities of their race) are morally suspect already, while the more idealistic members try to do what is right while terrified that they me damning their race to extinction. Meanwhile, some humans embrace the arrival of the aliens, particularly those on Venera, for whom the arrival of the aliens has been a godsend in terms of ensuring the base's survival. Others see contact with the aliens as something to fight for, while yet others are fearful.

Decisions need to be made and they need to be the right ones, else one or both races might perish or go to war with one another. But the situation is complex and both sides persist in misunderstanding one another, often wrongly assuming a monolithic unanimity from the alien parties that simply doesn't exist, risking catastrophic consequences.

This may be Sarah Z.'s best novel yet. She has once again created an alien species that is almost more believable than her humans, and she has set up a gripping, page-turning conflict that I can't talk too much about for fear of giving things away. An excellent book.

This novel is an amazing piece of work. It's intelligent, imaginative, and relevant to today's issues.

Zettel paints the unknown world of Venus so beautifully that you thought she had actually traveled there. Upon introducing the aliens that consider Venus their only hope for surviving their dying homeworld, her imagination shows more creativity than many writers do when writing about alien races.

This novel is a very rewarding read, even if slow at times. The heart of the story revolves around the issue of cross-cultural conflicts, bringing to light the fact that sometimes there is not always just one way to do something "right". Even if this novel becomes dated with its technology descriptions, its lesson will not.

The Quiet Invasion is extremely intelligent and heart-opening. It hits home the point that just because a people of an alien culture think differently, it does not make them wrong.

Dr. Veronica Hatch is the head of the Venus project team. It is her dream to turn Venus into a human colony. But people back on earth are losing their interest in the project. Finances are being pulled out. Veronica's dream is crumbling to dust. And then suddenly something comes up that makes interest in Venus flare up once again. An alien outpost is discovered.

Time passes and the story moves on and it is found out that the alien outpost is a fraud. Someone is interested in keeping the Venus project going either by hook or by crook. And then comes the twist. The outpost may be a fake but there are some real aliens around. Humanity is not the only race that is planning to colonize Venus.

So Veronica befriends these aliens and they live happily ever after. Oops! Sorry. No, that is not the case. What happens is that the aliens discover that the humans on earth are against their friends, the humans on Venus. The aliens, instigated by one of their number, who is motivated by power dreams, decide to destroy Earth. Earth is saved only by the supreme sacrifice of another of the aliens. Sandwiched somewhere between these events is a murder too.

What's wrong with the above scenario? Nothing much really, except for the fact that there is nothing extraordinarily right about it too. Plot is average. Characterization is week. The human characters lack dimensions and so do the aliens. In fact, the only thing alien about the aliens is probably their appearance. Other things like their psyche, their motivation, their power-hungry ways and their sacrifices seem all too human. The book can be read once if you do not have anything better to read.

And right at the end the reader discovers the real culprit that had put up the fake outpost on Venus. The butler dood it, of course. Just kidding.