A Review of Alien Invasion and Other Inconveniences by Brian Yansky

Ah, a horror-comedy alien invasion book for teens! Just what you wanted to start off the new year, right? The Sanginians are a little goofy here, except for what they do to the humans. Lord Vertenomous and his people conquer Earth in ten seconds flat, saying non-apologetically of the billions they have killed, "I am sorry for your loss." The remaining humans, preserved because of their latent psychic abilities, are referred to as "product" and enslaved. Jesse is one such human, and he is the first-person narrator of Yansky's cheerfully odd new story.

Jesse is sitting in history class one day when everyone in the room but him "falls asleep." Jesse hears a message inside his head informing him that his planet has been conquered by "the greatest beings in the known universe" and that it only took ten seconds. His first thought upon hearing the voice is that he's losing his mind.

The world is conquered in ten seconds? Come on. Also, the voice itself isn't particularly scary. Not like the breathy, booming voice of, say, Darth Vader. It's more of a whisper and a little squeaky around the edges. In fact, I'm kind of disappointed that the imagination of my damaged mind couldn't do better. But then I notice what I've been too freaked out to notice before. No one is moving. Every single person, including Mrs. Whitehead, looks sound asleep. I feel a shadow over me then, and it practically knocks me off my feet. I struggle to breathe. I force deep breaths. Then I do what you do when people are sleeping at a totally inappropriate time and in a totally inappropriate place. I try to wake them. I shake Carlee Thorton, who is the best student in school and would never, ever fall asleep in class. I punch Jackson on the arm.
"Jackson, dude, it's me, Jess. Wake up," I plead. He doesn't....
I try my cell but it's dead. I go out into the hall and try some good old-fashioned screaming. No one screams back.
I'm all alone.
It's so quiet.

As the story progresses, Jesse is taken to work in Lord Vert's compound, where he cautiously makes a few friends among the other slaves and finds his own psychic powers growing to the point that he starts hearing another human's mental voice in his dreams. As Jesse loses some of his fear of his captors, he begins to plan an escape. The action ratchets up from there, as Jesse and a few companions do get away and the aliens use their technology to try to hunt down the missing product.

Yansky does some interesting things with the idea of colonialism that should bring to mind what European nations did in places like Africa and Southeast Asia in the nineteenth century. That is, in Sanginian society, sentience is measured on the basis of psychic ability. Anyone lacking that ability is considered an animal and can be killed without compunction. But when Lord Vert's people recruit human servants with a little psychic ability, their interactions prompt that ability to blossom. This means that a planet full of humans with negligible sentience is becoming a place with signs of greater sentience. The answer to Lord Vert's dilemma is, of course, to create a cover-up so that product-rights activists back on his home planet won't take up the cause of the humans on Earth. (Compare his decision to limit the evidence of psychic skills to the efforts of colonial Europeans to prevent native peoples from learning to read and write, which might indicate that they were as intelligent as their conquerors.)

We get the Sanginian point of view from Lord Vert's correspondence, mostly with his politically powerful and intimidating father. Because Vert is comically afraid of his father and of making bureaucratic screw-ups, it's easy to forget that Vert is himself very powerful, has personally committed genocide on a scale of billions, and uses the humans as slaves, including sexual slavery. If you take the time to think about it, this juxtaposition is a little jarring. But Yansky's point is a good one: we tend to imagine alien invaders as soulless monster-machines. Yet isn't there something even more terrifying about a rather ordinary personality with such power over others? A guy like Lord Vert, who happily justifies doing horrible things and then worries about what's for dinner?

The human point of view in Yansky's book is also poignant, as people who thought they were pretty independent and relevant are suddenly treated like animals. (Again, slavery and colonialism would have felt like that. Or the way Jews were treated by the Nazis.) As Jesse tells a fellow slave, a girl he's starting to like, "We matter." And she asks, "Why?"

Alien Invasion and Other Inconveniences is fast-paced, often funny, and deeper than it seems at first glance, when it appears to be just another action-adventure tale. The book ends with a little group of human rebels in place as Jesse's powers take a surprising turn, clearly setting us up for a sequel. I hope that Brian Yansky can sustain his clever balance of humor, suspense, and even philosophy in the second book.

Note for Worried Parents: This isn't exactly a happy scenario, and Lord Vert has taken one human character as a concubine, a fact that, while it is never exploited, is quite clear (as well as necessary to the plot). A book for teens.

A Review of Pod by Stephen Wallenfels

Gritty-cool. That's the term I've decided on for Pod. This book pulls off what all kinds of alien invasion and action films have failed to achieve in recent decades: it's the ultimate sci-fi suspense thriller. All this without ever showing us a single alien—just their ships.

There are two stories in Pod as we follow a couple of kids whose lives implode when the aliens come. Josh, apparently a high school sophomore, is living a happy suburban life with his parents in a town near Seattle, only his mother is away at a medical convention in L.A. Then early one morning, Josh is woken by a horrible screeching noise and all of the radios and TVs in the house lose power. He and his father see a huge black pod descend from the sky. More pods descend, until they can be seen floating in every direction. Beams from the pods start to disintegrate all of the cars and trucks. Next the newspaper girl, who is running towards Josh, is gone in a flash of blue light as Josh's father holds him back from going out the door to help her.

Cut to Los Angeles, where twelve-year-old Megs is living a very different life from Josh. She and her mother have a car, but that's about it, ever since they ran away from the mother's abusive boyfriend. Megs's mom talks big, though it's pretty obvious she's making it on prostitution gigs. On this particular morning, she goes off with a man she's met, leaving Megs in the car, which is parked in a hotel parking garage. She promises to take Megs to Denny's when she comes back and blows her a kiss, telling her to lock the doors. Only not long afterwards, Megs hears a terrible screeching sound, and all hell breaks loose.

From there, we go back and forth from Josh to Megs, watching how they react to the situation in which they find themselves, now that anyone who goes outside will be disintegrated. In many ways, Megs's experience is the more horrific, since a group of thugs led by the chief security guard takes over the hotel and terrorizes the occupants under a pretense of creating order. Megs continues to hide in the parking garage, where she creeps from car to car, trying to find food and water. Unfortunately, two of the hotel thugs also come to the garage, looking for valuables in the cars. They become aware of Megs's presence, and she must play her already awful game of hide and seek even better. Megs has found a kitten, and even though she knows she probably shouldn't, she tries to keep it alive. Megs becomes more aware of how bad things are inside the hotel and even tries to help, especially after the kitten is captured by her enemies—whose preferred means of killing people is throwing them outside so that they will be destroyed by the alien pods.

Josh's troubles seem more subdued by contrast, but they are powerful in a quiet way. His father immediately starts worrying about water and supplies, becoming increasingly obsessive about counting every bite of food in the house. He and Josh bicker as they consider the future, if there is a future at all. And should they eat the dog? If it comes down to it, should they eat each other? This portion of the story slowly grows in intensity, made all the more horrifying as Josh sees what happens to the people in the apartment building across the street.

Yet in the midst of all this, animals can roam outside without being killed, which might lead readers to suspect that the aliens are pretty much against humans and their technology. (Various aspects of technology are destroyed along the way.) Are we talking ruthless environmentally concerned aliens?

At any rate, things get worse and worse for Josh and especially for Megs. Here's a sample of what it feels like to be Megs in the parking garage:

This is my new address:
Megs Moran
Level 6 Orange
Row J, Space 12
Los Angeles, California
Here are the directions. You go to Level 6 Orange—orange because all the levels have different colors. If you have kids, avoid the bloaters on levels 3 and 5. The smell is so bad they might puke. Find Row J—you can't miss it, there's a little brown Toyota truck at the front with muddy monster tires that Richie slashed. Walk all the way down to space 12, that's two cars up from the end. If you go too far you'll be staring at three huge spaceballs. I'm next to the White Ford Focus with dangling side mirrors (be careful not to step on the broken glass—there's lots of it). Knock three times on the trunk of the blue Volvo. I'll pop out like a weasel and say Nice to see you!—unless you're Richie or Hacker, in which case I'll scream my head off. Like I did an hour ago when I woke up from a dream about Richie cutting into the trunk with a chainsaw.

FYI, Richie and Hacker are the thugs who are looking for cash, guns, and Megs, AKA "the Parking Lot Pirate." "Spaceballs" are what Megs calls the pods. Bloaters are dead bodies, of course.

I said this is the ultimate sci-fi suspense thriller, but Pod is more than that. While most suspense thrillers tend to be more plot-driven than character-driven, here the suspense is all the more powerful because Josh and Megs feel so real and important to the reader, as do some of the secondary characters.

Although this book is easily classified as science fiction and is specifically an alien-invasion story, it is also a work of dystopian fiction. Only Pod takes place right when things fall apart. (See the author's ironic use of a Ronald Reagan quote at the beginning of the book.)

The kinds of threads Wallenfels leaves hanging at the end of Pod will make you really want to read the sequel. Even small details, like the brief exposure Josh has to one of the alien rays, though not the killing kind, make you wonder what might happen next. (Megs appears to have been exposed, too.) Besides which, we get a glimpse of how the two stories could eventually tie together.

I'll confess that Pod came out nearly a year ago, but I recently got around to reading it and had to wonder why I waited so long!

Note for Worried Parents: This is tough stuff, and not just because it's easy to infer that Megs's mother is prostituting herself. The alien invasion results in numerous deaths, and this somehow manages to pale by comparison to the misery and violence unleashed by the thugs who take over the hotel in L.A. Definitely a book for teens.