Aliens of Different Sorts
Mark Alpert’s The Orion Plan took me back to a large astronomy poster I had as a girl; I’d get lost in looking at its details for hours. This Wine and Cheese Award -winner gets my grudging Ebertian thumbs-up: I whinge because the reading went by too quickly, so gripping was the storyline. Unlike The Six , which was a YA-oriented novel (see my review ), this is an adult sci-fi thriller. (Although really, either book is equally readable by any age group, thanks to the lack of gratuitous sex in Orion .) But like The Six , there is non-saccharine treatment of characters with flaws or University-of-Life knocks; Alpert comments unapologetically about the notion of punishment and the breakdown of Western correctional systems, and he illustrates compassionately the issues around homelessness, grief, addiction, the call to ministry, ecological disasters and colonialism. But he is not preachy. As Terry O’Reilly said in a recent radio show , “Story matters” and this novel centrifugal-...