A young Hollywood agent gets an offer of a lifetime just after he has finalized negotiations with a young actress for a role in a space adventure for an actress’s fee of 14 million dollars. His boss asks him to represent an alien race who has arrived to orbit Earth. They are friendly and want to achieve good relations with the humans. Unfortunately, they are gelatinous globs who communicate with smells - with very bad smells. And they are able to infiltrate the brains of other animals, including humans - and even impersonate them. It doesn’t sound very good - so it won’t be an easy task. But after a few unlikely events, success just might be possible!
The writing is very light, not sophisticated at all, and there is even an irritating, stupid spelling mistake – a their/they’re confusion. Well, this was Scalzi’s first book, but I think he should have at least checked the spelling. On the other hand, that is a mistake that is often glaringly obvious to non-native English speakers but not so obvious to native speakers.
The solution to the problem is perhaps a bit too easy - I don’t believe that the public would have been a great fan of the “infiltrating people” aspect. The writing is pretty simple, as may be expected from the first effort, but it was nice, light reading while I was half comatose on an airplane during a long flight.
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