Norbert Haupt

Going through my boxes of old science fiction books, I came across Homegoing which I thought I had read before, but I was wrong. It is copyright 1989, and I must have bought it around that time, but somehow never got around to reading it.

An interstellar spaceship, populated by 22,000 aliens and one human, is arriving at Earth after a long interstellar voyage. I won’t disclose how the human got on the ship since that would be a spoiler. Just accept that fact that the human, named Lysander or Sandy, as he calls himself, has never seen another human being, having been raised from birth by the aliens. While he is human, he thinks, feels and acts like an alien. When he finally arrives on Earth, it’s like visiting an alien planet. How does humanity accept him and his alien friends?

Pohl imagines, from the 1980ies vantage point, before the term global warming was made popular, what the Earth would be like in the nearer future, like about now in 2012. He describes runaway pollution, raising of the sea levels sufficiently to flood Lower Manhattan and the belt of orbiting space junk so thick that spaceflight for humans had to stop. The human race is decimated to about 500 million people, by war, starvation and AIDS. This is the state of the world where Lysander and his alien companions arrive.

A first-contact story told mainly from the vantage point of the aliens, this is a very readable book. It is classic science fiction. By leaving this book in my book boxes unread for over 20 years, I enjoyed being able to experience this from the future that Pohl imagined in 1989, having come true in the meantime, and comparing what he got right and what he got wrong. It was a little bit like buying a 1972 Ford Mustang convertible and mothballing it undriven in a warehouse, only to drive it now as a 40-year-old brand-new classic.

Rating: **