Cry Of The Wind

We all know what happens when aliens invade: there's a big fight and then the aliens are driven off, or humanity is reduced to servitude. Well, no. We've got enough experience of colonisation to know it's not usually like that. And the Aleutian Trilogy is the best work to date to consider alien invasion in the light of colonised and coloniser.In the first volume, White Queen, the Aleutians arrive quietly in Africa, but their arrival has severe political repercussions throughout the world. In particular, we see the world as exhausted, running down, and opposition to the mysterious, technologically advance newcomers is neither as complete nor as energetically pursued as most alien invasion stories would lead us to expect.By the second volume, North Wind, the Aleutians are more established but no less mysterious. One of the key features of this trilogy is that Jones has created truly alien aliens, beings whose motivations and intentions cannot readily be understood in human terms. But, typically, the human response to the invasion has been to splinter and war against themselves. We begin to see that one of the underlying themes in the trilogy is to reimagine gender terms. Now "men" refers to anyone, male or female, who is aggressive, attack-oriented; "women" refers to anyone who adopts a more peaceful, nurturing role; and there are "half-castes" who attempt to be as much like the Aleutians as it is possible to be.In the third volume, Phoenix Café, the aliens are preparing to leave, but humanity has become so dependent upon their masters that this loss of leadership could be devastating. The world has been transformed by the biotechnology that the Aleutians brought, while more and more humans are having themselves surgically altered to look as much like the aliens as possible. The inevitable conspiracy is more a sign of desperation than anything else, the colonised don't want to be free of the coloniser, they just want to remake themselves into their own image of the coloniser. White Queen won the James Tiptree Award, an indication that this is one of the finest works of science fiction that explores and rethinks gender issues. But it does so in a colonial context that makes it one of the most subtle, original and powerful works of alien invasion ever written.