| |
| | Review | Ship of Fools by Richard Paul Russo |
 | | Richard Paul Russo's Ship of Fools is a science fiction novel set in an unspecified far-future, long after the Earth has been made uninhabitable, presumably because of human mismanagement. |
 | | It describes the events surrounding the ship's discovery of a deserted human outpost on a planet many on board the ship want to colonize and, shortly thereafter, its first contact with evidence of intelligent alien life: an apparently derelict spaceship clearly of non-human design. |
 | | In Ship of Fools, the tense scenes of exploration aboard the alien craft certainly evoke that film, but Scott's alien seemed (ignoring the sequels by other hands), ultimately, to be obeying a biological imperative to survive, whereas Russo's aliens are truly nasty, if somewhat unfathomable (as aliens should be). |
| www.januarymagazine.com /SFF/shipoffools.html (950 words) |
|