INVADER by Albert Fay Hill and David Campbell Hill

Keep your electric eye on me babe

Put your ray gun to my head

Now what we got here is less a Moonage Daydream and more a throwback to the classic alien invasions of the '50s with handsome genius scientists, harrumphing military men and deluded peaceniks all facing certain annihilation from advanced invaders. Their miene may be inscrutable but their agenda is clear: total domination!

Things start with a bang when a flying saucer blasts a jet liner out of the sky, killing all aboard. Genius scientist Christian Nilstrom thinks the visitors are testing us, probing our defenses. More aggression follows, and it becomes apparent that there are three saucers working together, throwing hooks and jabs at hypersonic speed on a global scale. Then things get worse ...

These guys are just the scouting party. The real threat is coming in hot from 61 Cygni, a fleet of hundreds of ships, and they're gonna be here in just 14 short months from now. Our only hope? To rally behind Mr. Genius himself, Christian Nilstrom, and build a gigantic gamma ray gun that can exterminate the coming threat in one radioactive wipe. We get a lucky break when we knock one of the scouts down over the Canadian rockies - this is one of the better sequences in the book - and salvage some precious wreckage giving us that much more of an edge. Will it be enough?

Like I said, this is classic '50s style super science fiction, with all the ups and downs that entails. Characters are mostly cardboard, defined by their jobs/rank and nationalities. The Brits keep saying pip pip and right-o, the Germans call everyone Herr and Fraulein, the Japanese speak with halting deference, and so on. The Hills' near future world building is shaky, spending too much time describing how - for example - the new Prime Minister is a young Tory firebrand who rescued England's economy with fiscal responsibility. And here's another weakness for a near future technothriller: we're somewhere in the '80s but the political scene is totally divorced from the real world of 1981. You can play things a couple ways here. Smart authors just skip making heads of state main characters at all and give us people from the lower ranks. You can have real historical figures on the periphery of scenes, giving you some verisimilitude. Or you can invent fictional leaders as the Hills have here, which if bungled comes off as clumsy and unconvincing. Things get shakier still with some antagonist characters like the peacenik academic Knox - who "could explain away the Killing Fields as 'excesses of the Party' while lambasting America for defending itself" - and the cartoonishly awful Russian harpy Olga, unhappily married to one of the main Soviet characters yet trying to seduce every man in sight with her giant tits (really). Attempts at technical accuracy and hard SF extrapolations (all GRASER arrays and LOOTS telescopes) nestle uneasily with the goofy characterizations and naive geopolitics (dig Japan's new nuclear island complex!). Worst of all is how much space is wasted here when we could be riding the highs of rumination on the unknowable threat ...

There's a tissue sample recovered from that crash in the Rockies, and from all analysis the Cygnians are just like us biologically. Good thing too, because if they were a little more alien maybe we wouldn't be able to meet them on their level at all - they might just slam a swarm of asteroids into Earth and call it good. There's that tension of knowing the unknown, the mild letdown we feel when bit by bit things are clarified. Things are never as frightening, as interesting as we imagine they could be. By novels end the Hills have almost got us there though, with our genius cast pondering the defeated fleet's voyage out of the solar system into the abyss after our lethal gamma ray burst. A ghost fleet, manned by a dead crew for infinity. Here's the stuff! Too bad it's so thin on the ground. Cool cover though.

Our cornball Invader gets two flying saucer scouts out of four:

Jovian Publications, 1981