From Publishers Weekly
Emshwiller (Mister Boots) avoids human-alien first contact clichés in this stark novel about two aliens, Lorpas and Allush, stranded on Earth. Fifty years earlier, their parents came to visit Earth—and waited in vain for a return flight home. Lorpas, a young man, has never known his own planet and scrapes by at the edges of human society, while Allush, a young woman, lives in the isolated alien enclave of the novel's title, hidden in the mountains somewhere in the western U.S. Alternating between their first-person perspectives, Emshwiller chronicles in spare prose Lorpas's journey to the secret city and the immediate attraction between him and Allush. But no sooner have they made their joyous acquaintance than visitors from their ancestral planet arrive, and each must decide whether to return home or remain on Earth. This carefully crafted, ambivalent story depicts alien and human alike struggling just to get by. (Apr.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
During an award-filled, 30-year career, Emshwiller has delighted readers and fellow writers with her unique brand of exquisitely rendered magic realism. The city of the title of her latest haunting book is a mountainous retreat, concealed by vines and tree roots, where alien tourists now stranded on Earth may assuage nostalgia for their home world, Betasha. It is to this now largely abandoned hideout that one particular alien, Lorpas, goes to seek fellowship after being arrested for vagrancy and escaping to the hills. There he meets and falls for Allush, a female Betashan who, like Lorpas, was born on Earth and has blended in so well that rescue is no longer appealing. Emshwiller alternates between Lorpas' account of his growing friendship with a bumbling rescuer whom he overpowers and Allush's tale of return to Betasha as the two meet, separate, and finally reunite to establish Earth as their new home world. A simple yet vivid parable on the value of cherishing the home one knows best. Carl Hays
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
"First and foremost, Emshwiller is a poet—with a poet's sensibility, precision, and magic. She revels in the sheer taste and sound of words, she infuses them with an extraordinary vitality and sense of life." —Newsday
"Emshwiller's readers know her to be a major fabulist, a marvelous magical realist, one of the strongest, most complex, most consistently feminist voices in fiction." —Ursula K. Le Guin
"Emshwiller's newest novel is a blazing fast read." —The Agony Column
"The finesse and grace of Emshwiller. She's a writer of such slantwise sensibilities and such deep perceptions." —SciFi.com/Sci Fi Weekly
"Emshwiller has been writing occasionally for 50 years, and a new work is a treat." —The Denver Post
"The Secret City is yet another strong late work from one of our treasures." —SF Site, featured review
"Damn near perfect . . . touchingly and complexingly so." —Asimov's Science Fiction
Book Description
Written in a voice that is accessible to both mainstream and genre readers, this gripping tale contains a contemporary political subtext that is packed with humanism, complexity, and subtle humor. This inventive story centers on a mysterious enclave protecting a lost culture, a hidden city in the wilderness where stranded aliens struggle to preserve their fragile society. Hoping for a better life, many have fled the Secret City in favor of trying to survive in the harsh human world; others remain concealed, living out a fading memory in hope of deliverance. When the mythical rescuers suddenly arrive, insisting on an immediate interplanetary return, these very-human aliens discover that neither world is truly their own.
About the Author
Carol Emshwiller is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts grant and a Pushcart Prize. She has received the Philip K. Dick, Hugo, and Nebula awards, as well as a 2005 World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement. Her novels include Carmen Dog, The Mount, and The Start of the End of It All. She lives in New York City.
