Book Review: ARIA: Left Luggage by Geoff Nelder

The year is 2015, and three astronauts on the shuttle Marimar have found a silver case. The case has an interesting soft holographic chevron design on the outside, placed on the shuttle in such a way that it requires human intent to move it. The case is collected and brought to Earth, where it's opened by a gung-ho techniican, but before anyone can work out what the meaning of the solid glowing blocks of green-lilac mean, people begin getting headaches that rapidly progress into serious amnesia. This is the start of ARIA: Alien Retrograde Infectious Amnesia, a condition that spreads so quickly that before long, all public services stop, shops are abandoned, medical establishments are empty and general apocalyptic chaos becomes the result.

Only a few people remain uninfected--Ryder Nape being one of them. He gets together with his friends Brownwyn and Brian and a few others in a remote village in Wales, where they're able to protect themselves with ammunition and seclusion in the hopes of finding some kind of cure. They are able to contact the space station whose inhabitants also remain uninfected, but when a second case is deposited there, the survivors have to make a judgement call about whether the alien race leaving the cases is friend or foe, and make choices that could either save, or end the human race.

ARIA: Left Luggage (Volume One) is a well-written novel with the pace and suspense of a video game (BioShock immediately comes to mind). The balance between character development and plot progression is managed smoothly, along with the thematics, which take the reader through a series of all-too-believable scenarios, chillingly showing how easy it would be for an advanced group of aliens to undermine the human race and have us destroy one another, without the need for any additional weapons or warfare. Of course they may be out to save us from ourselves. 

Article Author: Maggie Ball

Magdalena Ball runs The Compulsive Reader. She is the author of the novels Black Cow and Sleep Before Evening, the poetry books Repulsion Thrust and Quark Soup, a nonfiction book The Art of Assessment, and, in collaboration with Carolyn Howard-Johnson, …

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