{"id":1134,"date":"1999-10-05T08:21:01","date_gmt":"1999-10-05T08:21:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.fact.org\/reading\/?p=1134"},"modified":"2012-04-25T08:21:54","modified_gmt":"2012-04-25T08:21:54","slug":"the-alien-years","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.fact.org\/reading\/?p=1134","title":{"rendered":"The Alien Years"},"content":{"rendered":"<h3><em>The Alien Years<\/em> by Robert             Silverberg<\/h3>\n<p>Six people attended the discussion of <em>The Alien             Years<\/em>. This is a near future science fiction novel             in which aliens invade and conquer the earth. The             aliens remain offstage, and the story concentrates on             the people living on Earth during the alien occupation.             We encounter people forced into alien service, people             seeking to serve the aliens, and people trying to             overthrow the aliens. A large portion of the book             follows members of a family in California that is             active in the resistance throughout several             generations.<\/p>\n<p>We felt that this book had an intriguing premise, and             it was developed well. We liked reading about truly             alien extraterrestrial beings that were omnipotent and             impossible for humans to understand. The aliens did             strange things such as disassembling Stonehenge and             reassembling it in a new pattern, and there was no             attempt made to explain their actions. All of the             characters in the book who tried to understand the             aliens failed completely. The aliens were so             inscrutable<!--more--> that they were almost like forces of             nature. Several people commented that this book read a             lot more like Niven and Pournelle&#8217;s disaster novel             <em>Lucifer&#8217;s Hammer<\/em> than their classical alien             invasion novel <em>Footfall<\/em>. Silverberg&#8217;s prose was             polished and showed great mastery of expression,             allowing the action to flow swiftly and smoothly.<\/p>\n<p>The only complaint voiced about the book was that it             didn\u2019t show quite the level of imagination and             invention of Silverberg&#8217;s great novels of the 70s. The             books written by Silverberg at his peak, including             <em>Dying Inside<\/em> and <em>Hawksbill Station<\/em>, were             so good that a merely excellent book seems a little bit             of a letdown.<\/p>\n<p>Overall we found <em>The Alien Years<\/em> to be an             engaging new take on the alien invasion story. We were             fascinated by the situation, cared about the             characters, and found the book hard to put down.<\/p>\n<p><em>&#8212; A. T. Campbell, III<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Alien Years by Robert Silverberg Six people attended the discussion of The Alien Years. This is a near future science fiction novel in which aliens invade and conquer the earth. The aliens remain offstage, and the story concentrates on the people living on Earth during the alien occupation. We encounter people forced into alien [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1134","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fact.org\/reading\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1134","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fact.org\/reading\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fact.org\/reading\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fact.org\/reading\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fact.org\/reading\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1134"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.fact.org\/reading\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1134\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1136,"href":"https:\/\/www.fact.org\/reading\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1134\/revisions\/1136"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fact.org\/reading\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1134"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fact.org\/reading\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1134"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fact.org\/reading\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1134"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}