INTERCEDENCE

Aliens offer an average guy in Oregon a way to avoid death by transferring his consciousness to a female body in Denton’s debut SF novel.

Scott Michael Evers was raised by an alcoholic father and became a loutish, single, saloon-centered adult, prone to settling conflicts with his fists. He has one extraordinary distinction, though: As a boy, he was abducted by aliens—the big-eyed, inquisitive Sroans, whose saucer crashed at Roswell in 1947. Off-world,they monitor Scott remotely via implants. When Scott develops stage 4 cancer and stoically prepares to die in 2005, his extraterrestrial guardian angels reveal themselves with an urgent offer. A despondent Ukrainian woman whom the Sroan were studying has just shot herself in the head, and the aliens have the ability, via superscience, to transfer Scott’s mind to her body, enabling him to live and remain in close proximity to his small extended family; his best pal, Dan; and the few others he cares about. He accepts the Sroans’ offer, but as Jody, she encounters difficulty when she tries to convince skeptics that she’s been remade. She also has trouble adapting to her new situation; for one thing, men now treat her as a sex object—just as Scott used to do when he inhabited a male body. Meanwhile, government and military operatives notice the alien meddling and decide to take action. The body-switch gimmick was a standby in comedy literature even before it became a Hollywood rom-com plot. Here, Denton straightforwardly explores this setup in an SF context using the same sort of relatable, plainspoken language that genre maestro Richard Matheson employed for the plight of his protagonist in the 1956 novel The Shrinking Man. Denton doesn’t dazzle with wordplay, but he manages to eschew absurd jokiness. Along the way, he shows a generosity of spirit to the various characters, even the putative bad guys. That said, some readers may be disappointed the novel doesn’t delve more deeply into feminist themes and questions of identity and transgender politics, as SF virtuosos have done with similar material.

An uncomplicated but well-rendered exploration of a familiar body-switch premise.