The Story of the Century

A journalist and a movie star get pulled into an alien coverup in this SF debut.

Centuries in the future, after the Great Atomic War, not a whole lot has changed. People watch soccer, smuggle drugs, and see movies—and the government still keeps the existence of aliens top secret from the public. Clem Reader is a recently divorced journalist in New Los Angeles, and while he’d love to cover real news, he’s forced to chase down gossip on Bollywood stars. He needs a vacation, but when he returns to the family home—a fishing village on the Baja peninsula—he realizes that some of his relatives are involved in strange, covert activities. Then, on his return to New LA, he discovers that guerrilla forces massacred a convoy of Marines and civilians at a truck stop he’d passed only days before. Even as Clem tries to figure out what happened—there are whispers of some kind of military technology being involved—he still has to cover the entertainment beat. That’s how he finds himself sitting down for an interview with Saroyan Pashogi, a famous Iraqi actress and tabloid sensation. Saroyan has just broken up with her soccer star boyfriend, and she sees something in the dogged journalist that pulls her in: “They talk about many things. They quickly discover that they’re both orphans, and they talk a long time about what that means to them. As an orphan in the foster home in New Tehran, she discovered her talents, and her determination had given her the willpower to escape from the bad part of town to the good part of town.” Their budding romance is endangered when it becomes apparent that the government does not like that Clem has been sniffing around the truck stop massacre. Adding two more bodies to the count is nothing if it means keeping the truth of alien life a secret—and if Clem and Saroyan aren’t careful, that’s just what will happen.

Despite its future, post–nuclear war setting, the world Eysenbach imagines is surprisingly similar to readers’ own. At its best, his prose has a plain-stated lyricism, as here where he describes Clem’s native village: “Pretty much most of the village is out squid fishing tonight. The Koreans are buying, and although they’re paying dirt, they’re the only game in town. From the land, it looks like there’s a new city on the ocean.” But the writing is often rough and sometimes confusing. The book’s structure—it leaps around a large cast of characters, many of whom are never fleshed out—slows the pacing and sidelines the two protagonists. The plot ends up being a fairly silly one and one that could easily have taken place in the present day, which will cause readers to wonder why the author bothered setting it in an invented future. (The world may still have squid fishermen in several hundred years, but will it retain a nearly identical media landscape?) The novel is so ambitious in some ways that it makes the thin characters and familiar storyline that much more disappointing.

An intriguing but uneven SF thriller.

- Kirkus Reviews