Slave Harvest

The aliens have landed: what to do now? To the long line of fictions which have addressed this particular quandary must now be added Andrew Butcher’s Slave Harvest, in which the wicked intentions of the aliens in question – the Scytharene – are pitted against the resources of a group of seven teenagers. These teenagers, representative of the only age-group to have survived a pandemic known as ‘The Sickness’, have to contend with the Scytharene threat of enslavement, while at the same time sorting out their own psychological, social and sexual uncertainties. The relationship between these two strands in the novel is not easy, or convincing, though the parallels between the various levels of dissidence and dissent in each undoubtedly provides some clever moments. Considerable effort has been expended on attempting to emphasise the individualities of the teenage septet but, on the whole, they remain rather wooden and predictable. The author’s tendency to be didactic and unduly heavy-handed in his desire to stress links between the central motif – mastery versus slavery – and some of their contemporary resonance diminishes the possibilities of his narrative. The really keen alienologist reader will probably find something of interest here but, overall, the appeal of the novel is limited.