The title of the book gives a good indication of the style of this book. It’s a good sci fi spoof. It has no pretensions about being anything other than a rather silly story, and as such is one to read when you’re not looking for anything deep and meaningful. Within that style, it’s well done, but you have to like the style to appreciate it.
The story follows a human girl whose telepathic abilities are sufficiently developed for a representative of an alien race that look like giant cockroaches—yeah, kind of yukky—to declare her sufficiently sentient to warrant saving the human race from genocide via a directed meteor strike. The aliens are looking for a planet to colonise—aren’t they all!—and the earth is perfect, except that the alien’s moral code prevents them from colonising a planet populated by a sentient species. The report saying that humans are sentient, however, is ignored, and someone is nudging a meteor large enough to wipe out the human race onto a collision course. The human girl’s job, assisted by her alien friends, is to find out whose doing the nudging and nudge the meteor in a different direction.
Of course the odds are stacked against them—as you’d expect in any self-respecting B movie—but the interest comes in how the story plays out, and putting the silliness of the alien cockroaches aside, I found that I couldn’t predict the events or the creative solutions our girl hero came up with.
I did find some poor punctuation, but not enough to bother the ordinary reader. It could do with another proofread though.
In summary, if you like sci fi spoofs, you’ll probably enjoy this one, because it’s a good example of the genre, but if you’re looking for something substantial, then this is not the book for you.
I received a free copy of this book in return for an honest review.
4 stars
