Aliens as angels in another history version

Orbis
By Scott Mackay
Roc
408 pages
Available at Goodwill Bookstore

What makes science fiction fascinating is its alternate versions of the world as we know it, or as we would know it. Science fiction writers, with their fertile imagination, reshape facts in captivating stories of worlds at once so alien – and yet, somehow, manage to present us with a new understanding of the world familiar.

Scott Mackay’s Orbis answers a question that is at once controversial: What if Christianity is a mere tool aliens have been using to dominate our planet? The book presents an intriguing alternate history, with religion wielded as a powerful tool of "the Benefactors", beings from the center of the galaxy who slowly but surely invade earth after fleeing a home that has become inhabitable. In Mackay’s premise, these beings, who are the angels we know of, have dominated Earth since the period of the Roman Empire. The rest of the story is propelled by an even bigger question: What would man do once he finds out?

The books’ complicated but captivating plot fashions a story of the Roman Empire’s destruction caused by a battle between Julius Caesar’s legions and the Benefactors. Unable to defeat the alien beings, the Romans commandeer their spaceship and flee to another place, developing into a human race who all but remembers the location of planet earth after two millennia, and yet, uncannily retains the determination to defeat the Benefactors, who have eventually taken hold of the teachings of Christianity, using it as a device to spread their own.

Hope comes to humans in the form of underground resistance in North America and Europe, until, with the return of the heroic Romans, the humans – represented for most by an almost volatile mix of characters – become united in their fight against the invaders. It is a battle that builds into a strange climax in itself, with a questionable victory that descends most unexpectedly.

A strange, yet undoubtedly captivating novel, Orbis is definitely an original. Its best point, perhaps, is that it does not succumb to too much background information that is usually the downfall of many science fiction books. It plunges head on into the story, with readers nudged along with Mackay’s masterful ability to connect his fiction to the ordinary and the familiar through characters with whom they can empathize. In other words: As readers follow the characters, they come to know their alien world.

What comes even more as a pleasant surprise is that, upon deep reflection, the book presents two questions in tune with the times. Are all heroes really rescuers? And are all invaders really captors? – Althea Lauren Ricardo