Alien Nation 5: Slag Like Me by Barry B. Longyear

Alien Nation 5
Slag Like Me
by Barry B. Longyear
1994 Pocket Books

In 1959, journalist John Howard Griffin disguised himself as a Black man using tanning booths, medication, and make up, and travelled the American South, recording the experience for Sepia magazine. Unlike the similarly themed Soul Man...

his book Black Like Me seems to still be well regarded. I was familiar with the parodies, from Eddie Murphy in Saturday Night Live...

to Chris Morris' Brass Eye. Even Superman's Girl Friend, Lois Lane, gets in on the act

And the Punisher. Oof.

In Slag Like Me, a human reporter undergoes surgical treatment to look Tenctonese. He goes undercover in LA, hangs around gangsters, and exposes bigoted police. When he goes missing, LAPD and the FBI investigate, and Matthew Sikes undergoes the same procedure to flush out whoever did whatever to the reporter.

Meanwhile, George Francisco is partnered with former overseer and current FBI agent Paul Iniko to chase down leads, such as the exposed crooked cops and an angry neighbor.

I don't know if this story was based on unused season two scripts, and tie-in novels come with a lot of restrictions, so I don't want to assign blame, but everything about Slag Like Me gets it wrong.

Alien Nation is a metaphor for immigration, assimilation, and bigotry. These themes are baked into every scene of every story. I struggle to comprehend the creative mind that, after a movie, 22 television episodes, and four novels, decides "Hey, how about we make this next book about racism?" It also falls into the same trap as some X-Man stories - instead of using fictional bigotry to highlight and explore actual bigotry, it uses actual racism as a metaphor to explore the real theme, fictional racism against aliens who do not exist. And the discussions on racism and bigotry are not subtextual here, it's pure soapboxing.

One would think, given the title and cover and all, the main story would be Sikes living life as a newcomer. You would be wrong. A decent amount of page space is budgeted to him preparing, but he's barely out in public in disguise and can't manage to stay in character for more than two minutes. His first undercover act is to make an appointment with a Tenctonese gang leader, to whom he instantly announces that he is a human cop.

Very quickly they're pulled over and beaten up by the police. Matt is taken to the hospital and has amnesia, so I was hoping we'd have a bit where he would think he was Tenctonese for a while, but nope, he gets his memory back almost right away and promptly tells everyone he is a human cop. Sikes is not very good at going undercover.

At no time did the foundational premise of the book, Sikes going undercover as a Newcomer, have any affect on the plot or themes, other than to discover that LA cops would be as mean to Newcomers as they are to everyone else, which Sikes already knows.

The mystery plot is equally disappointing. Various conspiracies are hinted out before it's revealed to be characters who are named in passing once, and they did it for dumb reasons. Some mysteries have non-sequitur endings that reflect the chaotic nature of real crime, other times it reads like the author didn't feel like wrapping everything up and just picked a killer at random. This felt like the latter.

As with the last book, Sikes and Francisco are split up through most of the story, denying the buddy cop element, and is replace by Francisco and Iniko. We get kind of a Bugs/Daffy, Mickey/Donald deal where Francisco goes from being the rational half of the duo to being the irrational one. Pretty much all the soap opera elements, such as Francisco's home life, are neglected. We do get a little bit more of Dobbs, Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs' character, which was nice.

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Alien Nation 4: The Change by Barry B. Longyear

Alien Nation 4
The Change
by Barry B. Longyear
1994 Pocket Books

One of George's former resistance comrade in arms escapes from prison and uses mind control devices to fulfill an oath to kill anyone who has ever known George. George is going through alien menopause and Matt spends most of the the time in the hospital. Buck is skipping class to hang out with Tenctonese elders, who all sound like hippie burn outs.

Nasty enough villain, but the ending felt unfocused. Did not have the feel of the TV show in plotting or tone, and I assume that the cursing, violence, and rape scene wouldn't find it's way on the small screen. Based on a script for the unproduced season two, but not made into a TV movie like others.

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Alien Nation 3: Body and Soul by Peter David

Alien Nation 3
Body and Soul
by Peter David
1993 Pocket Books

Detective Sikes relationship with newcomer Cathy awkwardly moves forward. One has to be trained to arouse Tenctonese women lest their superhuman strength injure or kill them, so they enter a sex class, which Sikes approaches with his typical maturity.

Meanwhile George offers to father Albert's child and Susan, being influenced by her human coworkers, becomes jealous. Emily hits the Tenctonese version of puberty and tries to hang out with older kids, and Buck manages to stay out of trouble.

The differences in anatomy and culture fosters a theme of communication and consent in a mature manner while still being fodder for juvenile humor. And there's the actual plot - a giant and child escape from a genetics lab, but that doesn't take up much page length.

For some reason the prose grated on me for the first few pages until I could get into it.

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Alien Nation 2: Dark Horizon by K.W. Jeter

Alien Nation 2
Dark Horizon
by K.W. Jeter
1993 Pocket

The Alien Nation TV series ended in 1990. In 1993, the book series started, some based on unproduced scripts - my guess is they had some of season two already written.  Then in 1994 these scripts were used for a series of TV movies, which lasted until 1997.

The book has two stories somewhat intertwined, both of which seem to be bog standard Alien Nation plotlines - a group of bigoted humans seeks to exterminate the newcomers, and the newcomers' slave masters threaten to come to Earth to recapture their property.

Lots of emotional subplots - Sykes and Cathy relationship, Sykes gets jealous of George's promotion, Albert gets married.  Buck gets into Catcher in the Rye and stalks a teacher, which is very in character for him.

The plotting of Dark Horizon works for two episodes of a TV series, but is awkward for a novel. It would have worked better as two distinct halves, but it's presented as a single story, so you get a climax 3/4ths of the way in, then a whole new story.

It was true to the series, but there'd be a learning curve for new readers. Jeter does my least favorite thing I see in straight novelizations - to fill out page count, we get several pages of internal monologue of minor characters, and usually not in a way that adds to the story or fleshes out the characters.

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Alien Nation 1: Day of Descent by Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens

Alien Nation 1:
Day of Descent
by Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens
1993 Pocket Books

Alien Nation was a 1988 film about an alien slave ship that lands in the Mojave Desert. About 300,000 Tenctonese slaves, called Newcomers by earthlings, are assimilated into Los Angeles. The film and subsequent TV series is about human cop Matthew Sykes and Newcomer cop Sam "George" Francisco. The series was developed by Kenneth Johnson of V fame, and explores social issues like racism, cultural assimilation, and immigration.

The series ran for one season, ended on a cliffhanger, and was continued in 1994 as a series of made for TV movies. In between, this book series came out.  This first book is a flashback to before the ships landed, though with a wraparound of events just after the last episode. The other novels are based on the original scripts that eventually became the films, creating the unusual situation of the novelizations coming first.

Day of Descent has two separate stories that kind of combine at the end. In space, we see George and his family and their involvement with the rebellion that causes the ship to land on Earth.  On Earth, Sykes investigates his first case as detective - an astronomer is murdered after discovering an object heading to Earth.

Both are excellent, especially the half in the ship, though the pacing is a bit off.  Both stories wrap up and we switch gears to the story of the Newcomers' first days on Earth, something that felt like a brand new story.  The voice of the characters matched the series well, down to George's son Buck being a piece of crap.

My opinion of the book went down a notch or two a week later after watching the eighth episode of the series, "Contact".  The Sykes storyline is a direct lift from this episode. Again, the book isn't a novelization of that episode, nor is it in it's own continuity. It even has a forward where the stories fit in the chronology of the series.

Aside from that bit of business, this does what the best of tie-in novels do - add depth to the fictional world while keeping true to the original.

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