The Missionaries

© 1972 by D. G. Compton


[minor spoilers, beware …]

Okay, I hate doing this. I have to admit that there is a science fiction book that I did not like.

A few years ago I bought this gigantic omnibus of little three or four sentence reviews of something like a thousand SF books, from the classics of the Golden Age all the way up to the mid-80s or so. Unfortunately, that book got destroyed in the Great Basement Flood of ’09. Fortunately, I spent a good month or so reading through it just after I bought it and compiled a list of 280 must-reads that eventually became the Acquisitions List I take with me when hunting used books in the wild.

The Missionaries was on that list.



The set-up is worth the price alone. What’s not fascinating about a book that tells the story of alien missionaries landing on earth to witness their otherworldly spirituality? Like that hapless moth to the flame I was drawn. I bought it at the tail end of summer and bumped it up on the reading list, eagerly anticipating the tale as well as what that alien religion might be.

I was disappointed on both points.

Yet there were two other items that led me to not liking the novel. First, I was expecting something on a macro level, a world-changing clash of two (or multiple) Great and Transforming Ideas. I imagined an epic, with newscasters and generals and writers and artists and, of course, priests and perhaps rabbis and imams, duking it out with what would have to have been an inhuman (in all senses of the word) belief system bent on changing us fundamentally. Not in a good way, or, possibly even more terrifyingly, not in a bad way. But, no, the story is told on an annoying micro level, with only a half-dozen or so characters, with most of the “action” taking place in a tiny English village.

Second, there really was very little science fiction in the story.

The initial encounter with the Missionaries was done very well. Done off-page, like real good classic horror movies have early encounters with the monsters done off-screen. The revealed results were effectively … odd, I guess, “creepy” being too strong a word.

My main problem was with the main characters the Missionaries meet: a dysfunctional family consisting of an older, incapacitated military man, his berated wife, and their biker rebel-wannabe son. For the life of me I could not get out of my skull a properly English Archie and Edith Bunker and a moody Easy Rider Peter Fonda. All they did was bicker, bicker, bicker, and misunderstand each other. Before, during, and after their lives are affected by these alien Bible salesmen. And – gosh! They really don’t give much thought, or seem properly stunned, that their house guests are extraterrestrials! That would get in the way of belittling each other, I suppose.

The new Good Ol’ Time Religion from the Stars is nothing other than the Law of Attraction, that pseudocrap so prevalent in modern-day self-help (cf. The Secret), with that whole master-mind mind-meld stuff I’ve seen in both Napoleon Hill’s works and Stephen King’s Tommyknockers. I was hooked for half-a-page when it was named – “ustiliath” – and I found that attractive. (Why the lack of capitalization? Isn’t it an entity? No, it’s a “life-force”. Oh … okay.) But soon every time the Missionaries would expound upon ustiliath (which, I have to say, was maddeningly infrequent), I was hearing Deepak Chopra’s voice in my head.

There were some tantalizing hints of SF in the story, such as the fact the Missionaries had a ship in orbit, and had to “copy” or “imprint” the first humans they encounter to appear human. But nothing is followed-up on, nothing is shown or explained. There are dark allusions to the aliens’ ulterior motives, but that vein ain’t mined. Yes, the Missionaries are able to cause heart attacks in those who threaten them, but that’s done in an off-hand, ho-hum way. For such omnipotent beings, they are dispatched at the end of the story fairly routinely. And for such enlightened beings, they gripe and grouse endlessly among themselves about their purpose, their methods, their tactics.

I read somewhere that the whole tale is to be taken as a critique of man-made religions and of the faults of the missionary mindset as a whole. Perhaps. Perhaps I am too literal in my expectations. After all, it is well-known and accepted that the best SF really isn’t about the future, or the aliens, or the gadgets – it’s about us, here and now. Still, though, those social critiques disguised as SF need engaging SF in them; and the more engaging, the more effective the critique. Yet I can see where those who hold this view come from, and I’ll bump up the grade of the novel in recognition of this.

Overall, though, a disappointing read for me. I found it tough to get through, especially as all these thoughts solidified about a quarter into the novel. Sometimes these things can redeem themselves at the end. In the case of The Missionaries, though, not so much.