VOYAGERS II

At the end of the talky, mechanical Voyagers (1981), readers will recall, astronaut Keith Stoner heroically arranged to freeze himself solid inside an approaching alien spacecraft—alongside a dead alien—in order to force the world powers to mount a rescue operation. Now, 18 years later, Earth has studied the spaceship; Stoner's frozen body has been recovered and successfully revived. Stoner wakes to a world somewhat different from the one he knew: alien science has given Earth fusion power (hence, no more pollution) and force-fields protecting all major cities (hence, no threat of nuclear war); but dozens of wars, large and small, smoulder around the globe, formented by the World Liberation Movement, left-ish terrorists demanding a wholesale transfer of wealth to Third World nations. Stoner is a hot property: not only is he alone in being successfully revived after freezing, but he also has a copy of the dead alien's mentality in his brain—which gives him various superhuman powers. So Stoner is kept under wraps by Jo Camarata, his ex-lover and now a corporate president. Soon a power struggle develops over Stoner, involving successive layers of WLM bad guys and Jo's mad husband. Stoner escapes to Mrica, where he will learn how to stop the war by starving the WLM of arms and money and by using his super-persuasive powers to bring the warring factions to the conference table. All in all, standard ideas, plotting, and melodrama, along with an un-convincing and poorly developed alien presence: only for Voyagers fans.