Book Review: Have Wormhole, Will Travel by Tony McFadden

Have Wormhole, Will Travel: What it is about

From the publishers: “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.“

Have Wormhole, Will Travel: What I thought

Now, where did I read this before: Alien(s) come to Earth to stop Earthlings from developing potentially dangerous (to the aliens) technology? I’m sure it’s a coincidence, but reading two books like this in (almost) a row, makes you compare, and the other book came out as the (much) better.

But still, this was a fun read. Three friends, young women, believe that the very light skinned, light-avoiding men they see around, are vampires. And they’ll prove it, too! The men, Callum and Jacob are more or less stalked by the women and eventually have to admit: they’re not vampires, but aliens. There is proof, too.

Meanwhile, at the university, where Callum is working as a lab assistant, physics research is advancing more rapidly than he thought possible. His alien colleagues back at the home planet have only one solution. But the consequences are severe and really, Callum is enjoying life as it is. He doesn’t want change.

Together with the reluctant human scientist and the women friends, they try and save Earth from a horrible fate.

It wasn’t always believable and sometimes the story went a little too fast for me. The women characters were broadly interchangeable. But it was still fun to read and I liked the idea of just a few aliens keeping an eye on things on Earth. Who knows? Your neighbor could be from the Andromeda galaxy!

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Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars (Okay to Good)

Number of pages: 226

First published: 2013

I got this: from Netgalley (ebook)

Genre: speculative fiction, science fiction