4.5 Stars

Ooooh! Good one! Even though the sciencespeak left me a little dizzy at times! ( )

‘Science and Fiction’ starts with a mystery – a young man appearing from nowhere under a pile of autumn leaves in the spring – and gets stranger from there. Craig, a former Marine finds him, rescues him, and thinks the visitor may need psychiatric help. Between the amnesia and technobabble Nithael lets loose once he is at Craig’s house, I was delightfully confused for quite a while. I began to make sense of the weirdness after a while, and eagerly followed the revelations as Craig and Nithael worked together to solve the riddle of what happened.

Craig is a down-to-earth guy, or so it seems at first. After all, he is a former Marine, a medic, and practical should be his middle name. But he has certain abilities, just like his grandfather, and they are not what you’d call normal. His reaction to Nithael’s appearance is skepticism at first, but once he begins to listen to Nithael’s questions and comments, he begins to wonder.

Nithael comes from an entirely different world, one that is technologically very advanced. His reactions to the primitiveness of Craig’s laptop and the strangeness of a radio (“It’s only a receiver?” Nithael asked. … “Why not have a transmit function as well?”) are amusing. Nithael is the geekiest scientist imaginable, and watching him learn about human interaction as the two men get to know each other was a lot of fun.

If you like your science fiction with a large helping of mystery, if clues dropped in the form of observations and comments are your thing, and if you’re looking for a read that is entertaining, puzzling, full of geeky sweetness, and very imaginative, then you will probably like this free novella.
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