8 Billion Universes Against One: a review of Love, Sex and the Alien Apocalypse

Love, Sex and the Alien Apocalypse

Love, Sex and the Alien Apocalypse dropped just as the holidays got going, I had an unusually high post-retirement workload, and I was reading four other things at once. I shrugged and put it in the queue which meant maybe reading it for half an hour a day.

Only Love, Sex and the Alien Apocalypse started out with an incredibly tense scene of a young woman working the takeout window at the Funkmeisters greasy spoon as a black sedan approaches in an odd manner. Well, nuts. My reading cycle has yet to recover.

Cawdron can do suspense. One of the first things of his I read was Welcome to the Occupied States of America, which had a haunting scene based on nothing more sinister than a wheelchair missing from a line of wheelchairs in front of a derelict service station. When you put it right at the beginning of a novel (no easy feat) it’s what Stephen King, himself knowledgeable about generating suspense, calls “the Gotcha.” It’s the narrative hook that leaves the reader flopping, helpless, and gasping.

Cawdron delights in titles that grab attention (My Sweet Satan, Alien Space Tentacle Porn) and he covers the implicit promise that the contents live up to the title without getting schlocky or worse, silly. Yes, this book has love, sex, and in case you were wondering, an alien apocalypse. A very convincing alien apocalypse, given that we’ve yet to experience one. (No, cats don’t count.)

The heart of the book is that the alien is a hive mind, stunned to discover a new form of sentience, one in which billions of entities all have their own minds, and are their own universes. This is as incomprehensible to it as octopus intelligence is to us. It’s vastly different, and we are stretched to the limits of our imagination trying to figure out why it exists in the first place. And it begs the question of what other forms of intelligence we haven’t noticed yet.

The alien isn’t trying to subjugate us—it doesn’t even want to rape our women. It noticed us quite by accident, and it’s just trying to figure out what the hell we are. The alien flattens us just so we don’t get in the way while it surveys the planet.

If you’re looking for a stirring action novel where some bright guy figures out the master ship runs on Apple II ProDOS and sends a virus to wipe out their weapons systems while plucky young American spermbombs with strong wills and weak minds take them out with planes, move on. Cawdron surmises we’ll be knocked out before we even step in the ring. Stirring, yes. Suspenseful, yes. Independence Day crap, no.

As with most of his work, Cawdron’s Love, Sex and the Alien Apocalypse is both riveting and sometimes harrowing, and at the same time thoughtful, meticulously researched, well-steeped in philosophy and science, and deeply humanitarian. Cawdron has the rare ability to be fun and intellectually satisfying at the same time, and Love, Sex and the Alien Apocalypse showcases that.

Cawdron’s afterwords are always worth reading, and this one in particular is. He delves into the scientific and intellectual knowledge that informs much of the basis of the story, including the nature of consciousness, free will, bisymmetry, but not why anyone would want to eat at Funkmeisters.

Now available, along with all his other titles, at Amazon.

Comments

  1. Phil Bailey

    I also enjoyed LSAA very much. I gave it a five-star review on Amazon and GR, though not nearly as thoroughly and eloquently as you did here.

    It’s interesting to know that you’re also post-retirement. I retired on December 20th! Well, from my software development work, that is. My workload will also be high since I intend to write science fiction full-time. Right now, it doesn’t seem real – just Christmas break as usual for the moment.

    Cheers,

    Phil

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