SPACE RACE

Though anchored by heartfelt feelings of love and loss, this diaphanous tale is unlikely to engage readers the way Waugh’s more arrestingly premised “Mennyms” series has. Ever since he and his father Patrick moved to the village of Belthorp, Thomas has been telling his best friend Mickey that he arrived in a spaceship. He’s not believed, of course, but it’s true. Looking ahead to the future meeting of their two civilizations, the people of Ormingat gave Thomas a human body and sent him to be an English schoolboy for five years, part of a far larger mission to find out what makes Earthlings tick. His only clear memories being Earthly ones, Thomas is understandably upset when his father suddenly announces that it’s time to go—and barely have they begun their journey to Edinburgh, where the spaceship is concealed, than Patrick mysteriously disappears in a violent traffic accident. Traumatized, Thomas winds up in a hospital: unidentified, unidentifiable, and with an uncertain future. What would have made a fine short story is padded out with extraneous detail and characters, plus a lengthy, pointless side jaunt for Patrick, who survives the accident by reflexively shrinking to ant size, has a few adventures, then shoots up to normal at the first sign of real danger. There is never a glimpse of the aliens’ true form, or of the home planet for which Patrick so longs-nor do Thomas’s mutinous feelings last long enough to develop into an inner crisis. Aimless, patchy, uninspired work from an author who has done much better. (Fiction. 11-13)