Set in Sydney, this light-hearted science fiction thriller
proposes that visitors from another world are living among
us, making sure we don't learn how to use wormholes in
space-time. The visitors, calling themselves Callum and
Jacob, come from a red dwarf star system in Libra, so our
sun feels dangerously hot and in sunny Sydney they stay
indoors, wrap up outside, look pale and move best at night.
Unavoidably this leads fans of the vampire fiction craze to
zero in on them as probably vampires.
HAVE WORMHOLE, WILL TRAVEL - the title is a homage to early
book Have Spacesuit, Will Travel - would make us feel quite
sympathetic towards these off-planet folks, if they
weren't so busy discrediting cold-fusion research and
interfering in the lives of string-theory professors.
Callum and Jacob see Earth's dependence on fossil fuels as
dangerous to their home world, which contains such
materials but does not employ them. In order to stop Earth
people heading their way they need to stop us travelling
faster than light. Local girls Mandy and Sabrina,
meanwhile, are busy trying to track down the suspected
vampires, using smartphones, photo-recognition programs and
conversation in bars. Partly because they think the guys
are hot.
A physics professor, Dr. Sam Sheppard, is quietly working
on lines which look likely to succeed in making usable
wormholes, and Callum and Jacob are ordered to discredit
his work. We'd like Sam better if he wasn't so delightedly
certain that his breakthrough will bring him fame, fortune
and work at his pick of locations; he can't stop bragging
to his girlfriend, who doesn't understand and thinks he's
nuts, or hinting to his grad students class. Callum's off-
planet boss charmingly refers to Earth people as "mind-
numbingly stupid, incredibly xenophobic and violent beings"
so you can see why they don't want us coming any closer.
If the visitors can't sort out the situation, all Earth
will have to be wiped clean of people. But the two guys
have been here long enough that they've got to like us.
Sydney is described as a very diverse city, where the
vampires - sorry, visitors - see all races living in
harmony. They remark that in a mere hundred years humans
have gone from the Wright brothers to sending a shuttle to
repair a satellite. Who knows where we'll go next? Tony
McFadden is clearly having a lot of fun with this tale and
if off-worlders do HAVE WORMHOLE, WILL TRAVEL, I'd love to
meet them.
Vampires? No Such Thing.
Aliens, though, that's something else.
They've been here, living quietly among us, since before the
Industrial Revolution.
Their goal: To ensure we never leave our Solar System. We
have a bad habit of wiping out indigenous populations, and
theirs is the nearest inhabited planet to ours.
So when a scientist at Sydney University harnesses the power
of wormholes, making interstellar travel a virtual walk in
the park, one of these tall, pale-skinned aliens, Callum, is
forced to choose: destroy us, or help us survive the
inevitable Armageddon.
8 billion Earthlings, and our survival is in the hands of
one guy - alien - meant to wipe us out.
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