“From now on, every time a troublemaker shoots his trap, we’ve got to ask ourselves a question of immense significance; who’s talking now?” He put a long, delicate finger on the article under discussion. “Here is the first psychological counterstroke, the first blow of intended unity– the crafty encouragement of suspicion that somewhere lurks a threat of dictatorship. The good old smear technique. Millions fall for it every time. Millions will always fall so long as they would rather believe a lie than doubt the truth.”
This little, forgotten SF novel (published originally in 1939.) brought me a lot of joy - from time to time I regret not paying more attention to SF genre and somehow was inspired to check this out. In fact, it probably qualifies more like pulp fiction because there was nothing philosophical or epic about it, it was pure, good old fashioned action, with some nasty Aliens thrown for a good measure. The idea behind it is that scientists stumble upon a new discovery, that there is another, “sinister barrier” outside of our visual spectrum and once humans can actually see the world around them differently, they became aware of horrible floating Aliens (who might be original, true natives of Earth) who feed on negative emotions of humanity - wherever there is pain, agony or suffering, they arrive and suck the energy out of suffering people. Once we can actually see them, Vitons look something like some huge Medusa in the sky.
There is a quite gripping story with sort of James Bond character involved (he is government agent) Bill Graham who is a killing machine, womaniser and indestructible all at the same time - I must admit that it reads like the best adventure novel and I actually couldn't put the darn thing down - but the most interesting is how the humanity is described - when something totally new and unbelievably dangerous comes along, majority of the world refuses to accept it and start believing in all sorts of conspiracy theories, instead of listening to government advices. There is also a very intriguing theory that Vitons use superstitions because they know humans are gullible and often perform "miracles" or all sorts of phenomena, knowing that people will believe in everything: "the priest and the medium have been equally their allies in the devilish work of seeing that the blind masses stay blind."
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