Good News from Outer Space

The end of the world! Or a new beginning. George Eberhardt is dead . . . or was, The newsnet he works for has illegally revived him. But he finds himself examining the sensationalist stories he's been reporting for evidence that there are Aliens Among Us. Lucy, George's wife, loses her job for her role in reviving him, and finds herself abandoned and consorting with radical revolutionaries. The Reverend Jimmy-Don Gilray's Zion Tribulation Hour brings in millions of dollars and legions of converts every day, predicting that Christ will come again at the stroke of midnight on the last day of the year to judge the living and the dead. George's best friend Richard Shrike, who believes in nothing, plays con games with serious drugs. Meanwhile, a range of ordinary people across the U.S. undergo encounters with strangers who offer them sudden and miraculous escape. GOOD NEWS FROM OUTER SPACE is a wild, dark, comic ride across a fragmented America as the millennium approaches and dreams of redemption or damnation seem only days away. * George Eberhart is the head of Special Reports for the Hemisphere Confidential Report, 1998's biggest on-line news service. The Reverend Jimmy-Don Gilray is the founder of the End of Time Institute, 1998's most successful TV ministry. The Rev believes that on the stroke of midnight, December 31,1999, God will send his messengers to Earth in a spaceship, and the Day of Judgement will dawn. George believes that the Aliens are already here. George is right... GOOD NEWS FROM OUTER SPACE - the most thought-provoking SF novel of the year. Kessel's darkly comic vision is wackily funny, brilliantly cruel, and joltingly powerful... This book does things I didn't believe were possible. [Bruce Sterling] *** A sustained but dizzying look at the human animal as the millennium approaches – identity crises eat into men and women, the dead are medically reawoken, and dreams of redeeming Aliens raddle the large cast. There are echoes of Philip K Dick, but a gonzo Dick, and of Barry N. Malzberg's allegorized urban desolation (and black wit) – but Kessel's desolation, very frighteningly and very movingly, is populous with human faces, however fractured. (...) a formidable work.