Dianne's Reviews > Damocles

One novel I had read a long time ago "Contact" by Carl Sagan set the standard for me for books from this genre. Of course in that book as well as many others that have followed almost always have us Earthlings making contact on our own planet. This is the first time I have come across a book in which the Earthlings make the first contact and the planet they land on has not ever space traveled.

This was a wonderful novel that kept me engrossed the entire way and in fact, I wish it were an even longer book so I could see what happens to everyone. The characters are complex and the author takes pains in proving that though the Dideotans are similar to us, yet in their own subtle ways they are vastly different. We get a good description of the natives but it still boggled my mind, so I never really had a clear picture of them. I did get a feeling that they were more like us than I thought but even though they had a lot of technology, they were still a few rungs below us on the physical evolutionary ladder. It is not until the last couple of chapters that I did have my suspicions confirmed.

The book did get a bit bogged down in the complexity of what these two `sides' had to do just to start to communicate and the lack of communication did get a little frustrating for the reader. However, if the author had simplified it in any way I think that the purity of the story would have been compromised and it would not have been such a thought provoking novel.

I think if you give this book a chance, it will grab you and not let you go until the very last page.