Book review: the Martian Missile

By David Grinnell. A book of about the quality you'd expect from the cover. The other half of The Atlantic Abomination. Characterisation and description are non-existent and writing quality is low, so we fall back on the plot, which drags.

Our hero, in deepest Arizona, comes across a crashed alien, who implants him with some coded info, tells him to go to Pluto or die, gives him the gift of "not invisibility, but of not being seen", and dies. Somehow our hero ends up much like on the front cover, having hijacked a Soviet rocket; from there on a series of vessels somehow get him further out, so it becomes sort of like astral travel. The methane breathers of Jupiter help him out, he gets to Pluto, not one but two teams of aliens battle things out in a confusing way. It turns out that his encoded "info" is the measured "advancement rate" of our civilisation and somehow, errm I forget, the aliens decide to leave, and he goes home. Or something.

Don't read this book.