Agent to the Stars
Entry posted by Delta1212
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This wasn't a doorstopper in length so I finished it fairly quickly.
The set up focuses on an up and coming agent in Hollywood. After closing a multimillion dollar deal for one of his clients, he is called up to the office of the CEO, a legend in the entertainment industry. There, he is introduced to a blobby alien whose native language consists of rather terrible smells. After having watched several decades of television broadcast into space, and considering their appearance, the aliens decided that they needed an agent to handle their introduction to the Earth. The CEO can't drop out of the spotlight to handle things so the task falls to our young protagonist, who is then one of two humans on Earth aware of the existence of aliens. Meanwhile, a reporter for a gossip rag is dogging his heels.
The story is about as ridiculous as its premise makes it seem, a fact which is increased by the wisecracking pop-culture savvy aliens (though the extreme degree to which this applies especially to the central alien makes more sense later in the book). Considering that, however, the author did a surprisingly good job of developing aliens with a sufficiently... alien physiology and culture. Overall, it was actually more entertaining than I expected.
Now, that said, I did have a few issues with the resolution. Major spoilers follow:
One of the aliens' abilities that is revealed later in the book is the ability to control other animals. This goes up to the main alien inhabiting the body of a dying dog and using it as a disguise for a while. The agent is freaked out by this and adds it to the list of image issues that people will need to be made to overcome. The solution he comes up with is to find a way to introduce a public face for the aliens and make them popular before revealing them to be the public face of the aliens. This is ultimately accomplished when the agent's friend and star client is put into a coma and rendered practically brain dead. The alien takes control of her body, continues her career and wins an Oscar, revealing its identity in the acceptance speech, now a beloved actress who demonstrated she was close enough to human to convincingly portray one in a movie.
Here's the problem, the objective is to soften the impact of the revelation and keep people from being afraid. If an alien revealed itself and simultaneously demonstrated that it could take over people and be so convincingly human that anyone you know could be an alien, how limited do you think the paranoia is going to be?
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