In Mine, Selena Castillo uses her beauty, wit, and charisma to gain global popularity after she claims to be an extraterrestrial. That she says she has no proof, and to the contrary has a US birth certificate, is justifiable because government interest would block her from achieving her goal.
Anthony Sturgess--a lady’s man, though heretofore they have all been lily white--must believe that Selena’s claim is only a publicity gimmick, or that she is insane, as he falls in love with her, and he is the right agent to exploit that gimmick, if that is all it is, despite her rabid environmentalism.
Professor Hal Bronson is desperate to believe Selena’s claim after he and his ingenious girlfriend develop a theory that predicts an eventual cataclysmic subnuclear accident at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva. Their theory is discounted since its dire prediction is contrary to the operating history of the LHC: “We’re still here.”
Thus, Hal accepts Selena as the only being on Earth who might ever have witnessed a globally catastrophic technological accident; consequently, to him she is important and unique, but not a curiosity. His accepting demeanor seems to promote her long buried feelings: she might believe that her species was annihilated by a superior alien civilization, and in the aftermath she has been a solitary refugee with no one in whom to confide her loneliness and grief.
But if Earth is to be saved, by whom and for whom will it be?
Through humor, romance, and suspense, Mine entertains while its human characters resolve a case of mistaken insanity.
Selena Castillo proclaims herself to be an alien, and a pair of physicists begin to think that she’s the real deal.
Sten, an educator and nonfiction author (The Simple Sorcerer’s Probability Primer, 2008), offers an erudite sci-fi narrative with heavy doses of social critiques and romance. A captivating mystery woman from the mountains of Mexico, Selena Castillo may look 30 but claims to be thousands of years old and the last of her kind. Jaded tabloid-newspaper vet Tony Sturgess appoints himself her manager/agent/frustrated boyfriend, and he plans to ride the media gravy train, although he doesn’t believe a word of Selena’s story. Meanwhile, divorced physicist Hal Bronson is embroiled in a nova-hot affair with longtime student/protégé Dora (this upholds The Big Bang Theoryimpression of science campuses as sexual hothouses). The brainy lovers publish a paper proposing that the Large Hadron Collider could, without warning, set off an accidental Earth-vaporizing energy release. The storylines eventually intersect, as Selena, a celebrity megastar by now, announces her true agenda. The basic ET-or-not-ET premise, let’s face it, was hoary even when Gore Vidal riffed on it in 1955’s Visit to a Small Planet, but Sten has some fun with the observational humor, thoughtful pontifications, insights, and even raw shocks, even if the plot’s momentum must always yield to philosophical discourse (and spoofs of the likes of Morton Downey Jr., Wally George, and Bill O’Reilly have definitely passed their sell-by dates). In the third act, the action picks up abruptly with the sudden appearance of a new and frightening interstellar threat. This boosts the tension even more and ultimately gives the story the quality of high-tech fable.
Diverting, high-IQ social and eco critique garbed in a semifamiliar alien spacesuit.
