Customer Reviews

Illegal Alien

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First, I am a big fan of Mr. Sawyer. His imagination is unfathomable. Though filed in Science Fiction this is a story of Justice and Law. A legal system while flawed when left to the conscience of a 12 person jury can arrive at a just and honourable decision.

Perry Mason meets Star Trek in this first contact murder mystery.

When a damaged spaceship is discovered in Earth's atmosphere, we are introduced to an alien race apparently here in peace. With the help of American scientists, the Tosok work toward repairing their ship with the goal to return home. Everything goes amazingly well until the gruesome murder of a well known scientist. The likely suspect is one of the visitors and it is up to lawyer Dale Rice and science advisor Frank Nobilio to prove their innocence and defend their rights. Once uncovered, the truth changes everything.

Although this book reads very much like Sawyer's Terminal Experiment (a quick and easy read), it is safe to say that Illegal Alien definitely has more sci-fi to it and the sci-fi is well done. It is an interesting mix of mystery and science-fiction and the story is intriguing and not too terribly predictable.

The one thing that kept on bugging me was the names of some of the characters, alien names aside. Cletus Calhoun? Packwood Smathers? Come on.

I would highly recommend Illegal Alien to fans of mystery and/or science fiction. This book is a great summer read.

ILLEGAL ALIEN is one of Robert J. Sawyer's very best novels -- as you'd know if Amazon had carried over the reviews from the previous edition. Yes, this is a reprint of an older book, but it totally deserves to be back in print, and now it is in a very handsome edition from Penguin Canada. Margaret Cannon, the long-time crime-fiction reviewer for THE GLOBE AND MAIL called this "the best Canadian mystery novel of the year" and it also won Japan's top science-fiction award, the Seiun, for best foreign novel of the year.

The book tells the story of the aftermath of the brutal murder of a popular PBS astronomy-show host, who had been touring the world in the company of a small group of aliens from Alpha Centauri. The "trial of the Centauri" that ensues is gripping to read about -- the courtroom scenes are the best-ever in SF, bar none, and, as Margaret Cannon said, put John Grisham to shame. And the aliens are worthy of the best of Larry Niven or Hal Clement or Robert L. Forward. The characters -- including wily civil-rights attorney Dale Rice and the US Presidential Science Advisor, Dr. Frank Nobilio, fight in front of the judge and behind the scenes to make sure that justice is done -- and Earth is kept safe.

This book can be enjoyed equally by mystery-fiction fans, by science-fiction fans, and by those who simply enjoy a gripping story with some fascinating philosophical questions behind it. Sawyer, who wrote the novel FLASHFORWARD, upon which the TV series is based, just scored his 13th Hugo Award nomination (and he previously won for HOMINIDS), and he's also a past winner of the Arthur Ellis Award from the Crime Writers of Canada, so he's uniquely qualified to blend the mystery and SF genres, and he does it exceedingly well here. The verdict is in: ILLEGAL ALIEN is a fabulous read.

A little dated now,this book came out in the late 1990's and seems to have come out of a "what if?" extension of the OJ Simpson trials. That's not all bad and there is a fair amount of detailed Grisham-type court room procedural here. The actual case seems fairly straightforward and really doesn't seem much of a mystery and sort of plods along in the middle third. However, the final story arc does come up with a satisfying half-twist, once Sawyer decides to put some science into this fiction. The aliens are suitably alien, the main human characters are nice, brainy folk and all in all a good, not great, novel.