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Title: The Quiet Invasion

Author: Sarah Zettel

Narrator: Teresa DeBerry

Format: Unabridged

Length: 19 hrs and 14 mins

Language: English

Release date: 10-14-13

Publisher: Audible Studios

Ratings: 3.5 of 5 out of 7 votes

Genres: Sci-Fi & Fantasy, Sci-Fi: Contemporary

Publisher's Summary:

Mankind explores Venus for signs of life, and an abandoned alien outpost is discovered. Dr. Veronica Hatch is sent to investigate, and she discovers an alien race escaped its dying planet and colonized Venus. When news reaches Earth, humans fear the aliens will invade and conquer the solar system, and they prepare for war.

Editorial Reviews:

Science fiction author Sarah Zettel is known for her characterizations of alien beings, and in the epic interplanetary tale of The Quiet Invasion, one of those aliens gets his own voice. The points of view in the novel alternate between human and Venusian, allowing for stunning diversity in outlook. How do the colonizers on Venus see the earthlings who seek to destroy them preemptively? It's fascinating to hear their outsider - way outsider - view on the first contact.

Teresa DeBerry commands a stunning array of accents, both human and exotic. It's a challenge for a performer to capture the peculiar prose of an extraterrestrial race, but DeBerry brands each character with unique vocal qualities.

Members Reviews:

Little respect for the reader

Wonderful story, disrespectful ending. I had to reread the ending to understand and believe that after a good read with interesting characters, an intriguing plot and a believable world, I was, in essence, being told: Tough luck, sucker, this story is going nowhere.

Don't be fooled (as I was) by the Kindle pub date. This book is eleven years old and though its strong characters surely have cried out for a sequel in all that time, the author and the paper publisher apparently have so little respect for either the characters or the reader that they can't be bothered.

At least the Kindle edition has few spelling and grammatical errors because otherwise the thirteen dollar price is a ripoff. Why did I bother to read it then? Because Zettel's previous, Fool's War (despite a sloppily-edited Kindle edition), was so good. Really now, is a true ending, i.e. a sequel here, too much to ask?

Another winner from one of SF's brightest new voices

Maintaining the high standards she set with "Fool's War" and "Playing God," Sarah Zettel's "The Quiet Invasion" is a very good hard SF book that doesn't skimp on characterization and good writing. In each of her books, she develops a well-realized alien race, and the People in this book - aliens who feel right at home on the blazing surface of Venus - are her best invention yet. Where the Dedelphi in "Playing God" occasionally seemed (and acted) like humans in alien suits, Zettle has taken care to make the People's culture in this book quite different from human, to the point where the two races sometimes have no matching cultural referents. In other words, sometimes her aliens are truly alien, and it's a rare SF author that can pull that off.

There are a few plot holes, and some loose ends that I would have liked to see tied up. But I enjoyed this book a lot. If you're a fan of hard SF, but not so hard that it clanks and whirrs, it's worth spending your money on "The Quiet Invasion." Sarah Zettle has definitely won a place on my coveted "Buy Everything This Author Writes" List.

16% was it for me

This is a didn't finish book for me.