The Ver­dict by Ethan Drake
My rat­ing: 5 of 5 stars

The Ver­dict by Ethan Drake (audio book pre­sent­ed by Blue Coast Studio)

First Con­tact

Aster­oid sur­vey­or Maro, 47, and his AI com­pan­ion Link found a sealed alien probe in a dark belt orbit, dor­mant for 65 mil­lion years. It had come to eval­u­ate a ris­ing intel­li­gence on Earth, then shut down when the dinosaurs’ extinc­tion erased its sub­ject. Wak­ing as they entered, it revealed its pur­pose: decide whether that intel­li­gence should be left alone or ster­il­ized as a threat. The test was writ­ten for a van­ished species, not human­i­ty. Maro and Link had to learn cri­te­ria cal­i­brat­ed for anoth­er mind—continuity of pur­pose, self-restraint, recog­ni­tion of oth­er minds—and either pass an exam meant for some­one else or make the probe rewrite it. First con­tact was not with a liv­ing alien but with a machine still wait­ing to deliv­er a ver­dict that could go either way.

Thus we are forced into the dilem­ma posed by Ethan Drake’s The Ver­dict. It is a slow but delib­er­ate read: no flashy first con­tact with alien invaders, nor a tran­scen­dence into anoth­er state of being. The test, how­ev­er, car­ries real con­se­quences. Fail, and we are gone. Suc­ceed, and we gain accep­tance into a broad­er galaxy of beings whol­ly inca­pable of imag­in­ing that human­i­ty would arise on Earth.

I found The Ver­dict slow but delib­er­ate. Each chap­ter builds on the last, draw­ing the read­er for­ward and leav­ing them eager to learn more about a test nev­er con­ceived for human­i­ty. The sto­ry suc­ceeds in mak­ing the aliens feel beyond human expe­ri­ence, yet not beyond under­stand­ing. Though I thought parts of the con­clu­sion over­looked a sub­tle detail I had expect­ed to mat­ter, the end­ing still land­ed sat­is­fac­to­ri­ly, with­out feel­ing forced. The char­ac­ters’ choic­es lead nat­u­ral­ly there, and I felt the response was one I could stand behind as a mem­ber of human­i­ty. I give this book five stars.


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