Voice in the Mirror: The Final Apocalypse

""The First of the Chulosian Chronicles,"" this ""Sci-Fi Thriller,"" as the publisher puts it, might have made a great Cold War-era comic book. It turns out that beneficent, highly advanced, ""dolphinoid"" aliens--the Chulosians, who live on a waterworld orbiting the star Vega--have been monitoring human evolution for millennia. Despite an official Chulosian policy of noninterference, brave Kamal Tarn uses the Corbal Ring of Infinity to send a telepathic message 27 light-years to Earth via gravity wave, warning humans of the approach of a deadly wave of space radiation. When brilliant astrophysicist and astronaut Hank Stanton translates the ""real-time"" message received by the Hubble Space Telescope, he quickly finds himself embroiled in a conflict destined to become an interstellar war. While industrial espionage and political maneuverings shake up Earth, the Chulosian's worst enemies, the Eltorum Shayloree (a race of evil reptilian shapechangers), plot to enslave the planet. Shargel's novel is pure pulp piled on top of a paper-thin plot marred by scientific inaccuracies (among them, Vega--the fifth brightest star in the night sky--is said to have been ""discovered in 1983""). It would be easy to read all this as a campy spoof of alien mysteries and government coverups, if only the novel didn't seem to take itself so seriously. (Mar.)