shiny_i (1/26): Camouflage by Joe Haldeman

What?! I should be on my 15^th book already? Um, do half-books count at all? Well, sorry for the delay in submitting my first book review, but I guess I gotta start somewhere....

Joe Haldeman’s Camouflage is a good read if you like your sci fi sprinkled with historical military references, cheesy dialogue and some alien sex scenes. That’s right, alien sex, y’alls (but it’s kinda mild). If you can get past all of those elements, then you might be able to appreciate some interesting concepts. Namely, that in the not-to-distant-future, a mysterious extraterrestrial artifact is found deep in an ocean trench, and 2 archetypal aliens who have been living on earth for eons but don’t know about the other’s existence are drawn towards the artifact. The chapters alternate between their past lives masquerading as marine life and various humans and their present attempts to make their way to the artifact. When their paths finally merge at the end of the book, all hell breaks loose. You can pretty much skip through the narratives of the human protagonists because as usual, the aliens are much more interesting.

Even though Camouflage won the 2006 Nebula Award for Best Novel, I think his other book Forever Peace is better written. That book won the “triple crown” for both the Hugo and Nebula awards for Best Novel along with the John W. Campbell Memorial Award in 1998.