Goodreads Review: Alien Nation #4: The Change

Posted on May 26, 2009 by Phoebe No Comments

My review

rating: 1 of 5 stars

Alien Nation: The Change brings to mind a recent metafilter comment by one of my favorite Mefits, Greg Nog:

It annoys me to see so many people making the deeply stupid argument that the weight of canon restricts writers. A good, non-lazy writer should be perfectly able to write within the canon they’re working with. When someone’s writing a novel that’s ostensibly about the real world, no one says, “Well, you have to understand that it probably won’t be very good; I mean, all the history is so well-established, there’s not really room to do anything new.” Who in their right mind would point to, say, The Grapes of Wrath, and call it continuity pr0n just because it deals with events that the author himself didn’t have control over? “Yeah, it was good and all, but I think Steinbeck was sort of restricted in that he couldn’t turn Tom Joad into a samurai with a laser-sword who has a climactic showdown with FDR in the last scene. And also, it turns out that Joad and FDR were secretly brothers, and that both have telekinetic powers.”

It’s too bad that Greg’s advice wasn’t around for Barry Longyear when he wrote The Change. This is truly a terrible licensed novel. It’s beyond obvious that Longyear was excruciatingly unfamiliar with the universe in which he was writing. Not only is the dialogue off, but he fails to respect even the most basic canon details–like, in more than one instance, a character’s full name. Names and biographies are changed freely, for no discernible reason.

Perhaps these changes would have made sense if they served a particularly excellent plot, but the story here is all over the place–poorly developed, loose ends abounding. There’s a subplot about race that’s painfully heavy-handed; though the original series was often allegorical for race and discrimination issues, it never felt nearly this pedantic. And Longyear’s overly simplistic message–that we’re all the same no matter our color–is weakened by the fact that his female characters are so poorly written and shrill. Every female character, both established and new, seems to suffer from women in refrigerator syndrome. If Longyear himself can’t treat established franchise characters with respect, who is he to preach to us about treating our fellow men likewise?

This is a really terrible book. If you like Alien Nation, please skip this–you’ll be better for it.

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