Review: Leaving The Cradle
"Earth is the cradle of humanity but one cannot live in a cradle forever."
- K.E. Tsiolkovsky
UFOlogist, conspiracy theorist and all-round sci-fi nerd Dan is on a camping trip in a remote forest with his friends Val and Mark. Being a Fox Mulder, truth-is-out-there type of enthusiast, Dan is sharing his crackpot notions with his skeptical pals over the camp fire when something comes crashing out of the sky...
That something is, of course, an alien spacecraft and the vindication of all his long-derided convictions. Investigating the wreckage, the three young campers find the bodies of the alien crew ... and one injured survivor. At Dan's urging, they transport him quickly away from the crash site before the authorities have a chance to descend.
Their new acquaintance is Gharr, a Raharr of the Alliance Fifth Expeditionary Fleet. Having dropped out of a wormhole into the outer solar system a month before, the Fleet detected radio signals from the third planet and decided to investigate.
The Fleet enters orbit of Jupiter and sends a shuttle to Earth on a covert mission to learn more about the inhabitants. Unfortunately the shuttle is pinged by radar and shot down by the military. Soldiers find one survivor in the wreckage and evidence that someone else got to the site first and may have removed another of the occupants...
Leaving The Cradle by writer/artist Darth Biomech (Demin Egor) is a neatly-crafted First Contact story with satisfying depth and some impressive imagery. The tone is mostly light with a humorous edge, the characters - human and other - charmingly fallible in their drives and behaviour.
For Dan - the most wonderfully ironic person to stumble across Earth's first extraterrestrial visitors - this should be a dream come true. He soon discovers, however, that he is woefully unprepared for all that is entailed in hiding an alien from a government that wants the whole affair hushed up.
The aliens hold to a cherished First Directive that regulates their dealings with less advanced species, but these lofty principles soon turn out to be tiresomely inconvenient when things don't go to plan...
The aliens and their ships are well designed and detailed. The Raharrs are tall bipeds, each with four arms, four eyes and a large, formidable tail. Their mothership contains a large rotating artificial environment with an intricate landscape of buildings and trees. Their diverse ships range from human-like shuttles to fearsome battle cruisers.
All of the characters here face the same basic problem: working out the right course of action and how to make it happen. None of them live up to the heroic ideal, of course, and the confounding complications of real life keep tripping them up. In a cute nod to whole speculative fiction genre and its influence on the fringe element, our alien visitors are bemused by what they learn about us from their eavesdropping on our communications: the prevalence of science fiction and its depiction of bug-eyed invaders, ancient astronaut theories and Flat Earth cults...
Gharr is in the hands on well-meaning but hopelessly inept natives. Can he survive this primitive world without causing a profound sociological disaster? When every option seems to lead to another misstep, it seems anything can happen. Can the humans prove that they have evolved far enough to finally leave the cradle of Earth and reach for the stars?
LEAVING THE CRADLE from the website
Zak Webber
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