A group of hunter-gatherers is endangered by murderous timbermen in the Brazilian rainforest. Above the Arctic Circle, an old Inuit woman takes her skeptical, indolent \u201cgrandson\u201d to a remote old village (from which oil companies uprooted them) to enact an obscure ritual. Both use ancestral memories to summon help from an advanced extraterrestrial civilization of color-shifting, somewhat reptilian humanoids of about 8 feet in stature who call themselves the Indigo. Eons ago, interstellar Indigo explorers were awestruck by Earth\u2019s unparalleled biodiversity and beauty and left such safeguards behind to protect the planet. The two distress signals prompt the aliens\u2019 return in massive ships that intimidate even the Earth\u2019s superpowers. Meeting with a few chosen human representatives (including the U.S. president), the Indigo are horrified at the state of Earth, now beset by pollution, species extinctions, unsustainable economic development, war, and other existential threats. The Indigo give humanity one year to reverse the failing state of the world; meanwhile, they will remain as noninterfering \u201cObservers.\u201d Some Indigo opinion-leaders grow quite fond of humanity\u2019s arts and music; others harbor no affection for the predatory apes and begin a grim judgment process. A radical-environmentalist spin on Arthur C. Clarke\u2019s Childhood\u2019s End\u00a0(1953), Nebra\u2019s narrative will find favor with those who have fantasies of captains of industry and world leaders being brought to account by a galactic Greenpeace for crimes against nature: \u201cDolphins in terror, surrounded by humans with an enclosing net and frantically writhing and rolling in a red sea, the blood of their family. A Hawksbill turtle, grotesquely deformed by the plastic ring slowly choking it. The hillside shorn of its trees, the fertile soil pointlessly pouring away in streams with every rain.\u201d The polemical material is balanced by fairly nuanced characterizations (including developing nation indigenes, too often idealized by sympathetic writers as unspoiled, cardboard Edenic angels), good pacing, and a final act that is fairly unputdownable.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A group of hunter-gatherers is endangered by murderous timbermen in the Brazilian rainforest. Above the Arctic Circle, an old Inuit woman takes her skeptical, indolent \u201cgrandson\u201d to a remote old village (from which oil companies uprooted them) to enact an obscure ritual. Both use ancestral memories to summon help from an advanced extraterrestrial civilization of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":3666,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3665","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3665"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3665"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3665\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/3666"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3665"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3665"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3665"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}