author : Ian Stewart

Not only has extraterrestrial life been discovered, but it seems to be at war with us. That's the first conclusion when someone rearranges the moons of Jupiter to deflect a comet straight at the Earth. But maybe it's just a misunderstanding? A group of scientists is sent out Jupiter to try to make contact, and explain we'd really rather they sent the comet somewhere else. But the aliens turn out to be hard to contact, and the scientists need a bit of help from a maverick archaeologist and her animal-loving nephew.

This is in some sense the fictional version of the authors' Evolving the Alien, explaining just how alien aliens will be. They certainly succeed on the physiological front -- we get giant gasbags floating in the Jovian atmosphere, with a really weird genetics, and more. But I think they are less successful on the psychological front -- the aliens seem just extreme versions of certain human types.

The plot is rather uneven, and takes a while to get going. Once it does get going, it races along, with some nice twists and cliffhangers. There are zillions of coincidences -- but they are the kind I can almost forgive -- they are mostly used to explain parts of the plot (a sort of docudramatic infodump), and to reduce the cast of characters to a manageable level -- rather than to drive the plot off in unnatural directions.

But this is really a book of fun ideas. We get the physiology of the Jovian and other aliens, the explanation for ice at the lunar poles, the neo-Zen Buddhists, the mechanism to get to Jupiter in a hurry, the very cheeky explanation of the microwave background radiation, and lots of great little details. These ideas, and the whole plot-line, overcome the sometimes uneven, and occasionally clumsy, storytelling.