SOJALS rating:

Mediocre (2/5)

I first read this in August 2001.

Are there aliens out there?

There's certainly been no sign of them up to now. From an observatory on the moon Tomoko Nemoto discovers what may be the far-away traces of alien spacecraft destroying worlds for fuel.

But there seem to be rather a lot of them, and they may be coming this way.

Dauntless Reid Malenfant sets out alone to make contact with the alien "Gaijin".

I feel like I've read about a dozen Reid Malenfant novels, and I'm almost sure I've read this one before.

Generally I loathe those books that start with a nice little group of people sorting out everyday problems but end up with one or two of them transported down the ages to the far future, seeing the growth and gradual decline of the human race, and frequently, the ending of the Universe itself.

But this time, I slowly began to grasp the grandeur of the situation, as Tomoko and Reid and the others struggle to survive down through the generations.

So in the end I rather came round to the idea that this might be quite a good book, and that some people might consider it a great book.

The book also introduced me to the Fermi paradox concerning the existence of aliens: "They're not here, so therefore they do not exist". This is an intriguing but ridiculous argument.