Review: Only Human

Only Human by Sylvain Neuvel
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In the conclusion of Sylvain Neuvel's action-packed Themis Files trilogy we jump forward in time, almost ten years after the conclusion of Waking Gods, when Dr. Rose Franklin, Vincent Couture, his daughter Eva, and General Eugene Govender were abruptly whisked away on Themis, while celebrating aboard Themis, after seemingly stopping the alien annihilation of the citizens of earth who possessed alien blood. The book opens with a prologue shock. Two American pilots are controlling an abandoned giant, named Lapetus and they are using it to take control of Libya. This, as it turns out, has been status quo. America now controls North America and various other locations around the world. As we will later see, some other countries have gone the land-grab route, too. In Chapter 1, Rose, Vincent, and Eva are returning to earth from the alien planet Esat Ekt (the Home of the Ekt) with the aid of a young alien named Ekim. As we will later find out, in order to return his daughter to earth, Vincent has made terrible moral decisions. And as a result, Eva is not happy.

Cutting rapidly back and forth between their logs of life on Esat Ekt and dealing with the seeming mindboggling bureaucracy of the Ekt people, over the course of the book, although we seem to learn relatively little about the Ekt in a snazzy "let's show aliens!" kind of way, we learn a lot about their way of life and their tendencies, just like their earth relatives, toward discrimination and prejudice. In a seeming democracy, which Rose doesn't initially assess as clearly as Vincent and Eva, some people on Esat Ekt are disenfranchised due to lack of racial purity. It sounds all too familiar... But in spite of this, when Rose, Eva, and Vincent return to earth they are taken aback to find that a decade has wrought horrible changes on our planet. As Rose says, people are being "willfully stupid," ignoring scientific findings for the sake of comfort when marginalizing and doing active harm to a fraction of the population deemed unfit. "Our entire race is trying to lobotomize itself." These perceptions of Earth come deep in the book, and are discussed with a character that I had wrongly assumed died in Waking Gods but who, it turns out, survived, has been interred, and is then saved by none other than the dreadful Alyssa Papantoniou. Yes, I used the word interred. Earth has become a very frightened and frightening place after the alien attack. And as a result, your perceptions of someone like Alyssa may change, as well.

The battle that at the core of Only Human deals with the battle to (re?)gain some sense of an evolved human zeitgeist. While there are things I can quibble with in this book, such as the sketchy business of how Ekim is handled as a character, and the Ekt ultimate solution, which is little better than what's been going on, this is still, an interesting conclusion to the Themis trilogy.


I received a Digital Review Copy of this book from NetGalley and DelRey in exchange for an honest review.

View all my reviews