- Paperback: 304 pages
- Publisher: Ace Books; Ace Mass-market Ed edition (Jan 1999)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0441005926
- ISBN-13: 978-0441005925
- Product Dimensions: 17 x 10.4 x 2.8 cm
- Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 1,097,689 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Description
Product Description
By the winner of the 1995 Nebula Award for best novel, a superb new science-fiction thriller: Aliens have arrived on Earth … and they seem friendly.
Set in the present day, communication with the aliens – bizarre creatures with four-fold rather than two-fold symmetry from the Alpha Centauri system – is relatively straightforward. Their mother ship has been damaged and the people of Earth are asked to manufacture replacement parts, with the offer of alien technology in return. It will take a couple of years.
But the story climaxes in a tense courtroom drama with one of the aliens on a murder charge. It is a scenario that gives an entirely new slant to the broad moral issues and intense legal dilemmas beloved of Grisham readers: ET meets A TIME
TO KILL. The aliens actually have an INDEPENDENCE DAY-type agenda, but dissenters amongst them, one of whom is the alien accused of murder, are opposed to their government’s policy of sterilization of all other worlds.
… Then another starship arrives from Alpha Centauri with DIFFERENT aliens on board carrying news that eclipses all that has gone before.
The pace is remorseless, terrific, buttressed by the flow of exotic information – the aliens’ religion is especially interesting and relevant. Absorbing and exciting. Sawyer is a natural writer with a big future.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.From the Back Cover
ALIEN HAVE ARRIVED ON EARTH – AND THEY 'SEEM' FRIENDLY
Though bizarre to look at, the aliens easily make themselves understood. They hail from the Alpha Centauri system and call themselves Tosoks. Their mother ship has been damaged – the people of Earth are asked to manufacture replacement parts, with the offer of alien technology in return. It will take a couple of years. A wave of hope and joy spreads around the Earth: we are not alone!
But soon one of the aliens has been charged with the murder of TV’s most famous stargazer, thought to be the aliens’ friend. A tense courtroom drama unfolds…
And as justice is about to be served, another starship arrives from Alpha Centauri with different aliens on board, carrying news that eclipses all that has gone before.
PRAISE FOR NEBULA AWARD-WINNER ROBERT J. SAWYER:
The sense of fun and adventure SF had in its so called Golden Age … a modern sensibility … the best of both worlds’”
THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION
”Canada’s answer to Michael Crichton”
MONTREAL GAZETTE
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Daniel Dennett called natural selection Darwin's Dangerous Idea. He describes it as a 'universal acid', eroding the fabric of traditional habits. Dennett recognizes how violent those threatened by new ideas can become. Robert Sawyer has taken that thesis to a new, wonderfully conceived, level in this book. Those reviewers grizzling about this story recapitulating the O.J. Simpson trial must have skipped over the hard parts. Illegal Alien is a much deeper presentation of the workings of reactionary minds. We've all seen how vicious fanatic religious "leaders" can be when orthodoxy is challenged. Sawyer has extended that concept to a cosmic scale. And he's done a superb job of it.
While the bulk of this book is an excellent summary of a modern criminal trial, Sawyer's real success is the building of the alien personalities. Unable to lie, they are adept at evasion and equivocation when they deem it necessary. The aliens are not the uniform society usually found in speculative fiction. Instead, they turn out to be as divided as ourselves. That the division is based on the discovery of evolution of their species is classic Sawyer. He's to be congratulated on his deft handling of an alien civilization undergoing the same stress as our own in dealing with Darwin's Dangerous Idea.
Sawyer isn't just the best Canadian speculative fiction writer. He is at the top of the genre. Unlike so many of his fellows, the 'speculative' side of his writing is minimal. We may have to stretch our minds in reading him, but not because his ideas are too bizarre or his science base faulty. Sawyer's science in this book is rock solid. The exchange over evolution's producing the eye was a prime example of his research abilities. Richard Dawkins [Climbing Mount Improbable] must be proud of his 'colonial' advocate. Sawyer merges science and fiction with sublime finesse. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
This was a thoroughly enjoyable read. Robert J Sawyer has a way of saying what if to the most extrordindary ideas and then making you believe that it is plausible. The book is gripping from page one and as with all the best court room dramas twists and turns and keeps you guessing right up to the end.
Read this book.
Read this book.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
32 reviews
10 of 11 people found the following review helpful
Adept genre-mixing, but not as good as it could have been
13 Dec 1997
Format:Hardcover
Robert J. Sawyer has written some of the best and most imaginative science-fiction novels of recent years, so I read ILLEGAL ALIEN almost as soon as I found out about it. Sawyer adeptly mixes genres -- in particular, the first-contact subgenre of science-fiction and the trial subgenre of murder mystery -- and his wry and sardonic comments about the O.J. Simpson case and the problems of conducting and reporting celebrity trials are some of the best things in this book. The whole, however, turned out to be less than the sum of its parts. Without giving away key plot secrets, my major complaint was that we learned almost nothing of the aliens' ideas about law or their culture's legal institutions, which I had expected to hear about in a novel in which an alien is tried for murdering a human being. Also, there is a big contradiction between the book's early assertion that the aliens do not share humans' concepts of "good" and "bad" or "right" and "wrong" and some late but vital plot developments. In sum, even second-level Robert J. Sawyer is several cuts above the normal level of most science-fiction, but ILLEGAL ALIEN was not as good as it could have been. -- Richard B. Bernstein
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful
A clever combination of two of my favourite genres!
6 Jun 2010
Format:Hardcover
Editor John Campbell once challenged his writers, "Write me a story about an organism that thinks as well as a man, but not like a man". In "Illegal Alien", celebrated Canadian sci-fi author Robert J Sawyer has risen to the challenge and created the Tosoks, a technologically advanced non-humanoid alien species complete with personal foibles, taboos, culture, language and religious beliefs, even thinking patterns and behaviour that reflect both that culture and the physical constraints of their original planet.
When the disabled Tosok spaceship lands on Earth, first contact, initially tinged with fear and awe is actually surprisingly well handled and peaceful. Earth graciously welcomes the newcomers and humanity seeks to put its best foot forward recognizing the mutual advantages of peaceful co-existence and the enormous opportunities to be had by assimilating such advanced technology. Then Clete Calhoun, a popular astronomer and, to all appearances, the first human friend of Hask, one of the Tosok aliens, is found brutally murdered in a manner that clearly indicates one of the aliens as the perpetrator. When Hask is put on trial for capital murder, it's clear that the implications of the outcome are far greater than the innocence or guilt of one individual alien.
For the most part, "Illegal Alien" ignores the hard side of the sci-fi spectrum. There is some interesting discussion of orbital mechanics in multiple star systems but other than that, Sawyer is content to let such miscellaneous factors as faster-than-light interstellar propulsion or an ultra-fine monofilament that can be used as a razor sharp cutting wire creep into the story in Star Trek fashion with no explanation or attempt to explore the scientific underpinnings. Instead, "Illegal Alien" focuses on the softer issues of first contact, alien diplomacy and inter-cultural communication.
Not a deep story but an interesting one that blends soft sci-fi with intriguing courtroom drama and a very clever, warm twist ending that dovetailed beautifully with my personal hopes for what I am convinced is inevitable contact with an intelligent extraterrestrial species.
Highly recommended.
Paul Weiss
When the disabled Tosok spaceship lands on Earth, first contact, initially tinged with fear and awe is actually surprisingly well handled and peaceful. Earth graciously welcomes the newcomers and humanity seeks to put its best foot forward recognizing the mutual advantages of peaceful co-existence and the enormous opportunities to be had by assimilating such advanced technology. Then Clete Calhoun, a popular astronomer and, to all appearances, the first human friend of Hask, one of the Tosok aliens, is found brutally murdered in a manner that clearly indicates one of the aliens as the perpetrator. When Hask is put on trial for capital murder, it's clear that the implications of the outcome are far greater than the innocence or guilt of one individual alien.
For the most part, "Illegal Alien" ignores the hard side of the sci-fi spectrum. There is some interesting discussion of orbital mechanics in multiple star systems but other than that, Sawyer is content to let such miscellaneous factors as faster-than-light interstellar propulsion or an ultra-fine monofilament that can be used as a razor sharp cutting wire creep into the story in Star Trek fashion with no explanation or attempt to explore the scientific underpinnings. Instead, "Illegal Alien" focuses on the softer issues of first contact, alien diplomacy and inter-cultural communication.
Not a deep story but an interesting one that blends soft sci-fi with intriguing courtroom drama and a very clever, warm twist ending that dovetailed beautifully with my personal hopes for what I am convinced is inevitable contact with an intelligent extraterrestrial species.
Highly recommended.
Paul Weiss
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful
Aliens and Murder Trials...
13 July 2001
Format:Paperback
This is likely the Sawyer book that I enjoyed the least. Now, by that, I don't mean I didn't like it. In fact, it had some of the best written aliens to come from his pen, and had great human characters that I found well characterized and plausible.
The concept is fairly simple: Aliens land on earth, they tour around, become celebrities, and then someone who had close contact with the aliens is found murdered, and prime suspect number one is one of the aliens. Hence, a trial.
The notion of putting aliens on trial was very good, and the idea was kept rather sound. The science of the alien physiology was very well crafted into the story (especially the concept of using alien DNA typing in the trial).
Then, enter OJ Simpson. No, not as a character, obviously, but as reference after reference. This book got bogged down in the OJ references, which, given when the book was written, would have been fine, but reading it now made it clunky and a little bit out-of-date. Making a contemporary reference or two is usually fair play, but the reliance on OJ metaphors was just overdone, and this book will likely suffer more from it as time goes by.
Still, in and of itself, there is a good plot here - not just for those of you interested in the legalities, but of alien cultures and physiologies - not to mention a good ol' fashioned murder mystery! The twist at the end is another Sawyer great, and as long as you can get past the OJ stuff, it's worth your while.
'Nathan
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