Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, December 26, 1993                   TAG: 9312260115
SECTION: HORIZON                    PAGE: B-4   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

`BROTHER TERMITE' IS SCIENCE FICTION WITH A DIFFERENCE

Just suppose that the segment of the UFO community, which claims that the government has struck a secret deal with flying saucer aliens to keep them from zapping us and allowing them to abduct humans for breeding purposes, is right?

That is the premise of Patricia Anthony's second novel, "Brother Termite." And she challenges herself even more by making the chief alien her viewpoint character.

Anthony's first novel, "Cold Allies," touched on unidentified flying objects. Like the "foo fighters" of World War II, the tiny glowing balls in her story flit around futuristic battlefields where both sides are afraid they are enemy secret weapons. The government even drafts a woman who is a bogus UFO contactee hoping that she knows what she is talking about and can contact the whatever-it-is out there.

In "Brother Termite," the UFO scenario moves to center stage.

U.S. presidents dating back to Eisenhower have had to live with the secret compact allowing the aliens to artificially-inseminate humans to try for a stronger life form than either parent. (Like H.G. Wells' Martians in his 1898 "War of the Worlds," the aliens are physically weak and dying out.) By the time period of the novel, the aliens have come into the open and are part of the government. The current president, whose life has been extended by alien medicine, is a figurehead. For all practical purposes, the aliens are in charge.

That is where their problems begin.

Dealing openly with humanity proves far more difficult than doing so secretly. Reen, the central alien character, finds himself corrupted by humanity as he continues to deal with it, but others of his kind are influenced even more and enter into conspiracies against him.

Poor Reen never seems to quite understand what he has gotten himself into. But Anthony does not play the story for laughs. Perhaps her greatest accomplishment is that she evokes reader sympathy for Reen to the extent that you catch yourself hoping that the humans - us - will not succeed in some of their plans against him. Anthony's science fictional lens gives us a view of ourselves that would be hard to achieve otherwise.

Paul Dellinger covers Pulaski County for the New River bureau of this newspaper.