Short Book Reviews: The Last Man Alive

Relic, by Alan Dean Foster (Del Rey)

In the far future, humanity has managed to wipe itself out not only on Earth but on every other colonized planet. So far as he knows, Ruslan is the last human in existence. He’s not alone, though. A race of benign (seeming?) aliens, the Myssari, have taken him under their care. Their goal is to use his cells to clone a new generation of humans, thereby extending their knowledge of sapient races. His price for participating: their help in rediscovering Earth, birthplace of humanity. Of course, things go wrong, among them the appearance of a rival alien race who also want to form an alliance with him. And various other things that fall under the “spoiler” category.

This sounds like pure, classical Alan Dean Foster, full of action and imagination.  Alas, that is not the experience I had reading this book. I’ve loved Foster’s work for decades, and I don’t know if he ran out of ideas, got sedate in his prose, or simply tried something more thoughtful, but the result was a soporific, meandering narrative punctuated here and there with a bit of suspense or action. (I highly recommend it for insomniacs.) It felt like a perfectly respectable piece of short fiction padded out to novel length with emotionally distant, almost Victorian prose.

Here’s an example:

He had no doubt that the dedicated if diffident Wol’daeen and her colleagues would try their utmost to successfully revive some of the other cold-stored humans. It would be a scientific triumph for them if they could do so. But having seen what he had seen and heard what he had heard, he was not sanguine.

The ratio of prose to passage of time in the story varies from plodding and repetitious to the whiplash feeling that all the interesting parts got skimmed over and it’s months or years later.

In the end, the story elements came together well. I would expect no less from an author as seasoned as Foster, but on the whole I found it neither absorbing nor satisfying. Which was a pity, because I'd been so excited to read it.