The Alien Years
Robert Silverberg
HarperPrism, 1998
428 Pages

Aliens come to earth, make life miserable for humanity, and leave.

What the story is about is the lives of the humans dealing with the aliens, who appear completely indifferent to humanity. Except they're not. Therein lies the problem with a book written by a publishing icon. No mere editor dares to mess with the copy, so it's pretty much published as submitted. No continuity checking required.

The glitches really are minor though. In the beginning, the aliens capture a bunch of humans in nets, take them aboard their spaceships, and have them stand around in awe-inspiring rooms. Then they let them go. One person, wife of one of our lead characters, is a believer in an aliens-are-gods cult, and she naturally projects her beliefs on the aliens. Somehow, she contacts the "authorities" who are watching the space ship, broadcasting a television image and her explanation of their arrival. In spite of this obvious technological collusion, the aliens are referred throughout the book as having no contact and making no response to any sort of transmissions from humans.

While things start off peacefully if indifferently, soon enough someone takes a pot-shot at the visitors, and they retaliate. Over the years of occupation, further attempts are made to injure them, which result in draconian but abstract responses such as "turning off all electricity" (a concept that needs some science checking) and releasing a plague that kills off a significant portion of mankind.

Man is reduced to living in primitive conditions, the main explored effect is the disappearance of all central authority and infrastructure. In a way this is just another post-apocalyptic fantasy, but with the aliens on hand to keep humanity from recovering it's full technology and civilization. Eventually the lives we're following converge on a compound in the hills above Los Angeles (where else?), and we follow a generation that doesn't establish a cell of a new civilization but merely lives on the scraps of what still exists. They embody both the "resistance" against the aliens and those who accept and live with them.

Of course, the aliens can't be all that interesting if there's no interaction, so eventually we discover that humans do cooperate with them, work for them, and have some interaction. We explore the concept of hacking an alien computer system by going in through the power grid, which of course the aliens, with their star-spanning technology, use to power their PC's, which no doubt run Windows.

Finally, half way through the final chapter, the aliens simply leave, in a manner supposedly as enigmatic as their arrival and occupation. We've sorted through our own "Lord of the Flies" for what will happen to humanity in their absence, we agonize a moment or two over the struggle to rebuild, and we're done.

It's entertaining, it held my attention, but really, it's been better done before.