★★★☆☆ | Science Fiction | Digital | Borrow | StoryGraph | Goodreads
An alien from a dying planet arrives on Earth to establish a sanctuary for his home world. All goes well until the alien decides to deaden his homesickness and sensory terrors of humanity with copious amounts of gin. Substance abuse runs through all of Tevis’s books. Even extraterrestrials aren’t immune. Tevis himself battled alcoholism for most of his life, so there is an autobiographical ring to the struggles that almost every character in this novel faces with drinking.
He had discovered, quite by accident, that it could be a fine thing, on a gray, dismal morning—a morning of limp, oyster-colored weather—to be gently but firmly drunk, making a pleasure of melancholy.
The broader message of this cautionary tale is that while sufficiently advanced technology may bedazzle us, it will eventually destroy us.