Harvest doesn't really have any major flaws; it just fails to achieve greatness in just about every respect, although it is still a quick and entertaining read.

Like Robert Charles Wilson's other books, Harvest begins with a fascinating premise. A huge UFO has been orbiting Earth--with no attempt to communicate with us. Then one day it unleashes a horde of smaller UFOs, one for each city in the world--but those UFOs also just sit around and do nothing. And then, one day, every person on Earth hears a voice that asks a single question: Do you want to live forever? The protagonist of Harvest is one of the few people on Earth who says "No," and the book is mainly concerned with how he deals with his solitude (his beloved daughter said "Yes," like almost everybody else), and how he deals with a new world in which almost everybody is now alien to him.

Wilson does a decent job describing a world in which such an unthinkable event has occurred, but his writing style--as usual--is a little too simple, his emotional vocabulary a bit too sparse, to really communicate the event's visceral impact. Instead, Wilson resorts to archetypes to tell his story: the distraught woman, the strong woman, the punk kid with a good heart, the crazy military general, and so on. As a result, his relatively novel idea takes on the distinct overtones of a pulp novel filled with familiar--and, consequently, unexciting--characters. And the plotline suffers too from a predictable arc that in the end signifies almost nothing. (I suppose that the whole point of the book is that the actions of the few remaining humans has very little effect against the god-like aliens--but still, that's no excuse for fixating on trivial, inconsequential actions.)

Perhaps I sound like I'm putting this book down too much. It's not that Harvest is a bad book: the problem is just that it's completely forgettable, even though it's entertaining while you read it. As with most of Wilson's other books, Harvest ends up being a book you remember for its "hook"--and very little else.

Copyright © 2002 Steven Wu