Chad Oliver (1928–1993)

El joven sociólogo, Paul Ellery, decidió preparar su tesis estudiando la composición social de un típico pueblito del Oeste norteamericano. Y eligió Jefferson Springs, en Texas. Cuando terminó su investigación halló algo que lo inquietó: ese lugar era demasiado típico. Y cuando supo que ninguno de sus seis mil habitantes llevaba allí más de quince años, ese conocimiento alteró sus vigilias y aguijoneó sus insomnios.
El día que Paul Ellery tuvo la respuesta a sus preguntas supo que Jefferson Springs era la avanzada de un nuevo mundo. Y que él -como todos nosotros algún día- tenía que elegir cuál era el suyo. A quien debía su lealtad más profunda.… (mere)

“Suppose that one day man landed on some distant planet. Why would he have come, what impulse would have driven him across the darkness and the light-years? Could he explain, and would he even try? If he set out to explore that fearful world, if he trapped some specimens, what would he do if he were attacked by monstrous beings he could not understand?”



In “The Shores of Another Sea” by Chad Oliver



Right after the Bishop’s “No Enemy but Time”, I re-read “The Shores of Another Sea” by Chad Oliver, a first contact story also set in Eastern Africa. Though it devoted a good deal of space to story elements arising from its Kenyan setting, the character setup was pretty minimal, a sympathetic protagonist built on a fairly standard “rugged outdoorsman” chassis. However there was a character arc which was economically worked into the story, its resolution arising from the experience of the alien contact. I didn’t think it was a great book, but it was an interesting contrast to the Bishop. Where Bishop tended to draw his non-SF elements from literary fiction, Oliver turned to another generic tradition, an adventure tale set on a wilderness frontier, a strategy that worked better for me as it seemed less dissonant when grafted onto an SF story.… (mere)

Shadows in the Sun is an odd little book. The blurb on the back coupled with the cover art suggests the book is about an anthropologist, Paul Ellery, studying the relatively small Texan town of Jefferson Springs and gradually coming to the shocking realisation that every single one of the town's inhabitants is in fact an alien.

The first couple of chapters support this hypothesis pretty well, since they introduce an anthropologist, Paul Ellery, who is studying the relatively small Texan town of Jefferson Springs and who has gradually come to the shocking realisation that every single one of the town's inhabitants is in fact an alien. It reads like the book has started in media res, and I waited for quite a few of the book's scant pages for the flashbacks to start and to find out what aroused Paul Ellery's suspicions. But the flashbacks never come, the book simply starts quite late in Paul's tale, a few hours before he gets the ultimate proof to confirm his hypothesis.

The rest of the story is essentially built around the notion that the aliens—who are in fact humans, with Chad Oliver trying to sell the unlikely notion that Earth-like planets abound in the Milky Way, and on each one humans have evolved to be the dominant species—are willing to let Paul become a member of their society, and him having to choose between a suddenly worthless existence on Earth or an overwhelming and inevitably never satisfactory life as a citizen of the Greater Galactic Commonwealth. He agonises about the choice up until the final page at which point the author, having done a jolly good job of convincing the reader that neither choice is a good one, seems to have flipped a coin and picked one of the roads for his character with the vague suggestion that merely deciding one course over the other is sufficient for Paul's happiness. I was about as convinced by that line of reasoning as I was by the story in general.… (mere)

Shadows in the Sun is an odd little book. The blurb on the back coupled with the cover art suggests the book is about an anthropologist, Paul Ellery, studying the relatively small Texan town of Jefferson Springs and gradually coming to the shocking realisation that every single one of the town's inhabitants is in fact an alien.

The first couple of chapters support this hypothesis pretty well, since they introduce an anthropologist, Paul Ellery, who is studying the relatively small Texan town of Jefferson Springs and who has gradually come to the shocking realisation that every single one of the town's inhabitants is in fact an alien. It reads like the book has started in media res, and I waited for quite a few of the book's scant pages for the flashbacks to start and to find out what aroused Paul Ellery's suspicions. But the flashbacks never come, the book simply starts quite late in Paul's tale, a few hours before he gets the ultimate proof to confirm his hypothesis.

The rest of the story is essentially built around the notion that the aliens—who are in fact humans, with Chad Oliver trying to sell the unlikely notion that Earth-like planets abound in the Milky Way, and on each one humans have evolved to be the dominant species—are willing to let Paul become a member of their society, and him having to choose between a suddenly worthless existence on Earth or an overwhelming and inevitably never satisfactory life as a citizen of the Greater Galactic Commonwealth. He agonises about the choice up until the final page at which point the author, having done a jolly good job of convincing the reader that neither choice is a good one, seems to have flipped a coin and picked one of the roads for his character with the vague suggestion that merely deciding one course over the other is sufficient for Paul's happiness. I was about as convinced by that line of reasoning as I was by the story in general.… (mere)