Book details of 'Illegal Alien'

Title	Illegal Alien
Author(s)	Robert J. Sawyer, Robert J Sawyer
ISBN	0441005926
Language	English
Published	January 1999
Publisher	Ace Books

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Reviewer amazon.com wrote:
Aliens, Tosoks, have finally made contact with Earth, but there are only seven of them, and they've arrived in a disabled spaceship. The Tosoks are intelligent and surprisingly easy to communicate with, and are happy to tour Earth and see what humans have to offer. But during a stop in Los Angeles, one of the human scientists traveling with the Tosoks is gruesomely murdered, and all evidence points to the alien Hask. The Los Angeles Police Department is determined to indict Hask for the crime, even though the aliens have little concept of laws or crime as we understand them. The only thing the U.S. government can do is secretly procure the services of Dale Rice, a leading civil rights lawyer, and hope he can clear Hask of the charges. But as the trial progresses, evidence indicates a cover-up by one or more of the aliens. Humanity's survival--not just Hask's fate--might hinge on the jury's verdict. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Reviewer Rob Slade wrote:
The book jacket loudly trumpets the surprising plot twists of the book. This is the fault of the publisher, rather than the author, but it does rather detract from the enjoyment of an otherwise very pleasant piece of science fiction when you find that all of "intriguing" plot twists are predictable well in advance (including a weapon first invented by Isaac Asimov, if I remember correctly, and re-used in a modified form in such non-sf works as Michael Slade's "Ripper" [cf. BKRIPPER.RVW]). The plot ... well, the plot *is* convoluted enough, and yet simple enough, that to discuss it at all is almost to give the game away entirely. Most of the action centres around a trial, the trial of one of the first aliens to land on Earth, who has been charged with the murder of one of the first people to meet him. Yet, in the end, the trial itself is almost irrelevant to the story. While there is a token effort to present differing cultures and attitudes between the aliens and ourselves (in an interesting reversal of recent sf dogma, the aliens are the religious ones while the earthlings are the more atheistic), the book assumes a rather stunning similarity in psychology. A number of actions take place that, in view of the story in its totality, really make very little sense at all. However, again, this series is about technology. Now, there isn't an awful lot of technology on offer in this text. But one part notes that the aliens are able to cross interstellar space because of an ability to hibernate. Very useful ability, that. They need nothing more, to sleep for two hundred years, than a comfortable bed, and a cool temperature in order to induce the hibernation state. Now that comfortable bed is one thing. The aliens have an arm running down the middle of the back, and therefore a slot in the bed to accommodate it, and therefore they don't toss and turn much. After two hundred years you would have one heck of a set of bed sores. However, hibernation, as we know it, does not drop your metabolism all that much. Get a good supply of body fat, and you can actually go for a month without eating. Bears only have to extend that a few times. But even if you were able to drop your metabolism to one percent of normal, a two hundred year trip would mean that you would have to pack on a two year supply of nutrients. That'd be a fair sized pot. The aliens, though, haven't developed hibernation to get them through the winter. Or, rather, their periodic winters are four hundred thousand years long. Let's say that you can drop your metabolism to one percent of one percent. (That would be equivalent to a heart beat every three hours or breathing about twice a day for us, just a bit beyond the time suggested in the CPR lessons.) You would still have to carry forty years worth of goodies, or roughly a lifetime supply, to get you through that period. Put another way, can you see something living on the same time scale that we do, being able to survive for a time that starts to be significant in geologic terms? copyright Robert M. Slade, 1999
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