Preternatural

Karen Rohmer Guerreri is recently divorced, middle-aged, alienated from her children and unhappy with her writing career. Worse still, the telepathic aliens in her new novel, Preternatural, are apparently trying to contact her--unless, of course, she's going insane, which seems likely. If the aliens aren't real, though, why are other people seeing them too? In Guerreri, Bonanno (most recently, coauthor of Saturn's Child and author of several Star Trek novels) has created a protagonist whose life seems to be, at least by implication, uncomfortably close to her own. This novel, in fact, is something of a roman a clef, with a number of thinly disguised actors, two of them from Star Trek, appearing in major roles. The aliens, part of a group mind (assuming they're real), have no sense of time and only the vaguest feeling for individual identity; they also believe that they've created Karen and our world. Their interaction with humanity, however, is slowly destroying them, with unknown consequences for us. Guerreri, whose career has involved writing novels based on a defunct TV series, SpaceSeekers, hopes that her new, more serious book will be a success, but is disappointed when PW dismisses it in a single-sentence review. Bonanno's novel, however, clearly deserves more serious attention. It is a complex, occasionally painful book that will amply reward readers of serious SF. (Dec.)