Fluency (1) Paperback – June 18, 2014

I Speak AlienBy Bob Gelms Fluency by Jennifer Wells, the first book in the Confluence series, causes me to ask the first question, "When can we expect book number two?" This is a wonderful book. Ms. Wells does almost everything perfectly that a sci-fi novel should. The book follows the exploits of Dr. Jane Holloway. She is a linguist, hence the title of the novel, but fluency in what? The answer is why she is included in the latest mission in space.Sometime in the 1960’s NASA discovered a spacecraft orbiting the Sun in the asteroid belt. It’s gigantic. They don’t know how it got there or how long it’s been there. It doesn’t send out signals of any kind detectable on Earth. It evinces no hostile intent; in fact, it evinces no intent at all. NASA has come to the conclusion that the craft is uninhabited and is nothing more than a derelict. So, NASA, of course, has hidden its existence and set about with the space programs Mercury, Gemini, Apollo and the space shuttle developing a mission to send to this craft to find out what it is and where it has come from. More importantly, where is it going? Is our solar system its destination? This is called a first contact story. Dr. Jane Holloway is included in the crew because NASA needs someone from Earth to figure out how to communicate with an extra-terrestrial life form if there is one on board. Jane is a specialist in reconstructing ancient languages from scratch and in her resides Earth’s best hope of communicating with an alien on the ship. Ms Wells puts a fair bit of hard science in Fluency, which is very much to my liking. There is enough to drive the story forward in a fascinating way because all the hard science is believable, much like in Andy Weir’s The Martian. Everything in Fluency can be extrapolated from hard science going on right now in the present day. Ms. Wells wisely doesn’t overload the reader. The hard science in the book serves the plot, it is not the plot. Ms. Wells gets right to it when the crew docks with the alien spacecraft. This is where everybody expects a “take me to your leader” moment. Instead there is nothing. They gaze in through the hatch and what they can see goes on for a good long way. As they step inside lights come on. This could be automatic and not necessarily a sign of a sentient life. Could the beings who sent this ship be totally disinterested in Earth and her inhabitants. What if they crashed there? Then it happens. Jane seems to go catatonic and when she wakes up is imbued with all kinds of knowledge she shouldn’t have. She says she has been in contact with one being on the ship. It helped her save two members of the crew. She says that the ship is called the Speroancora and it has a single occupant whose name is Ei’Brai.The crew is dumbfounded and a few of them simply don’t believe her even when it’s pointed out that communicating with an alien species is why she was included on the mission. The military types draw their guns in anticipation of some sort of conflict. It comes, but not from where they were expecting it. Ei’Brai helps them out of a serious jam but still some of the crew is in doubt. Jane is learning the language and Ei’Brai is showing and telling her things that are simply overwhelming. I won’t give much more away that that. All great science fiction starts with a strong central character and an interesting idea. There have been many first contact stories and this one ranks, in my opinion, with the very best of them. Most of the time, Earth is presented with a very aggressive race that wants something from us like in War of the Worlds, Starship Troopers, Alien, Independence Day or Contact. Ei’Brai and his race want something from the people of Earth but I can guarantee you it is nothing like what anyone on our planet would have ever expected and Dr. Jane Holloway is in the middle of it. Fluency put a big smile on my face and I had an amazing time reading it. There are over 1100 5-star reviews on Amazon.com, if that’s the sort of thing that trips your trigger. If you like sci-fi, even if only a little, pick up Fluency. I am sure you will be glad you did.…I wonder if Ms Jennifer Wells is related to H. G.?

Overall, I really liked this book. The author clearly has a mind for the techincal (I like so called "hard" sci-fi, the kind with lots of techno-jargon and fancy tech), as well as being well-read and an expansive vocabulary while keeping things at a easy-to-read, relatable, and well-edited level. However, this book suffers a bit, and has an overall "confused themes" kind of air to it.The premise is pretty simple: for decades, the American government has known of a mysterious alien ship residing in the Asteroid Belt, but an impending collision with an asteroid compells them to send a single spacecraft with six crew members to investigate and possibly recover the alien ship. Intriguing ... and had this concept been explored more along the lines of "mysterious empty alien monolith" or "creepy derelict that may or may not be openly hostile", the book would have fit perfectly with my expectations and been a perfect read. I went in thinking it was going to be a space-based sort of take on Michael Crichton's "Sphere" (a phenomenal book for those loving twisty-turning psychological thrillers based around scary alien technology). "Fluency", however, turns out to be considerably different from that, but not necessarily in a bad way ... but not really in a great way either.The biggest complaint I have is a lack of consistency in terms of the overall theme or plot progression. It's a debut book, so I can't be too harsh on the author, since overall this was a surprisingly good read. However, I feel that she was a bit confused on what exactly she wanted this book to be about. The plot starts out, as I said, like it's going to primarily be an "explore the empty derelict space ship" book. But even though it's said it took 10 months for the crew of six human explorers to reach the alien ship, almost no background story is provided leading up to their arrival at the ship. We get the one or two obligatory flashbacks to the protagonist's recruitment, and a few random paragraphs about life on the Providence (the NASA spacecraft), but that's about it. Once aboard the "derelict" ship, things quickly change, and the theme of the book changes ... not dramatically, but significantly. And later, about 2/3rds in, the theme kind of changes again, this time in a way that I found a little odd, a little extreme, and a little discordant and cliche. This book is supposed to be the first in a series, so I feel like best course would have been to leave out this third thematic change until the second book.Another not insignifcant issue is character development. First and foremost, the portrayal of the protagonist seems rather confused. We're told she's strong, and made it out of a near-certain-death situation in the deep Amazon, and that she passed a rigorous series of psyche tests with NASA, yet it seems like everytime something happens onboard the alien ship, we find her "fighting back tears" or "blinking back moisture" or having a minor mental break. Keep in mind, these six people were chosen, among possibly hundreds of candidates, thousands even, to go explore the first alien ship known to mankind. Ordinarily, I would say this is a typical mysoginistic portrayal of women being emotional ... but the author is also a woman ... so that's odd. In addition, the title of the book, and the immediate casting of the protagonist make it seem like there will be a lot of alien language decoding and mystery solving, but a rather convenient plot device occurs right at the start of things to make her original role practically irrelevant. In general, despite there being 6 characters, there's only one other character with any kind of development (but no real progression or change), and one of the remaining 4 is mostly a cardboard cut-out, used primarily as a plot device in one particular scene, then largely forgotten and passed over. The other 3 are largely just copy-paste cliches.Don't get me wrong; my criticisms here are made with the intent to inform and change, rather than poke and tear apart. Overall, I liked the book. The vernacular used, the narration, MOST of the plot points, the drama, the techno-jargon used, the ideas and concepts are all captivating and interesting. There are a handful of minor plotholes, and a dozen or so things that never get explained fully, for the more curious minded readers (for example, an alien computer system knows Latin ... but no modern language. Why? How? Why no new languages if the ship's been sitting there for decades, maybe centuries?), but overall, it's a quick, but not unstimulating read And many of the questions I did have actually got answered by the author in a surprisingly logical and scientific way. Most of the shortcomings here are the kind that can be passed off as the normal glitches of a debut novel, or things that can be improved with future installments, and so for that reason, I give this book 4 stars, where elsewhere I may have given it 3. And ultimately, if a book leaves you feeling entertained, then the act of weaving a fictional narrative served its purpose.I recommend the book, and look forward to the next installment in this series.

I am very happy with this book. Great read. However you should know I'm a fan favourite of this type of story Man discovers mysterious craft etc, etc. The author is terrific at creating believable dialogue between characters and a great story in such a short period of time. I will definitely grab the next couple of books to see how it goes. Oh and one more thing. It was just revealed that octopus is NOT native to this world. There is no prehistory for these creatures. Interesting or what????

Por fin un relato que logra cautivar mi atención. Leí este li ro en una sola noche!!! No pude soltarlo hasta terminar

There are lots of really, really good things about this book: the world-building, the complexity, the plot, the aliens… The ingenuity of the alien ship and the way the lifeform aboard messes with her head (and therefore ours) makes for exciting reading.There are also some things I liked less, like the somewhat wayward depiction of the group of astronauts selected for the mission. I couldn’t decide whether to call them stereotypes or just ‘would NASA really not weed these people out?’ But then, with the sort of people appointed to positions of power these days, and the possibility that NASA actually wants to the mission to fail, well, I suppose you can just about get away with them. They do make for a lot of inter-personnel (deliberate) tension, and they certainly have very different objectives from each other. Jane, being a civilian, is allowed to have different objectives, of course.The basis of the communication between the alien and Jane is a form of telepathy. That leads to some interesting scenes, where eventually you wonder what is real and what is not. There are some very icky mammoth man-corroding slugs which appear to be real. As I said, the world building (and the alien science & technology) is very well done. Some reviews have hammered the writing, but I didn’t notice anything too clichéd (apart from the whole set-up).Fluency is an excellent story, with some ingenious twists on the ‘what really happened at Roswell’ theme. In the end it leads to a series. I’m not sure I’m sufficiently sold on Jane’s adventure to continue it, but I do recommend the books to others who wonder what those little green men might turn out to be.

Brilliant.I have loved this series from book 1 and it just gets better as it goes along.The characters are well developed and relatable. The universe is gritty and believable.Very much looking forward to book 5.

One of my favourite's Sci Fi book , with space travel of course and some aliens but almost mysteries lots of mysteries ;.And for once the main characters come from earth ,with an heroine smart and resouceful, built like a thriller,the journey begins with the discovery of a lost vessel but ,I can say nothing more because I don't want to spoil this story .