Today I have author Cat Jordan with us to share a guest post of Top 8 Books With Aliens that are NOT Science Fiction in celebration of the release of her book, Eight Days on Planet Earth, which releases today!! So happy book birthday, Cat! Take it away! 

When I saw my new book, EIGHT DAYS ON PLANET EARTH, was tagged on Amazon as “science fiction,” I shook my head in disbelief. The book may have some science and it’s most assuredly fiction but I would never in a million years call it sci-fi. To me, science fiction is Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury and William Gibson and Octavia Butler, not me.

So that got me thinking: what other books have I read that have aliens in them but are not actually science fiction? Some of the books on this list might be shelved under that heading but I would argue that my first reaction when hearing the titles is something other than sci-fi. YMMV.

1. A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle

Clever Meg Murry and her kind-of boyfriend Calvin tesseract through space with three witches to rescue Meg’s scientist father and eventually her younger brother, Charles Wallace, from an Evil Force. A children’s classic which was made into a decent television movie and will soon be in theaters as a Major Motion Picture (can’t wait!). Like my novel, I would say it has some science and it’s mostly fiction but the story doesn’t revolve around the science. Could it be told without it and be the same? Yes, absolutely. Call it Classic Middle-Grade Literature.

2. K-Pax by Gene Brewer

Is K-Pax a real planet? Is Prot a real alien or does he suffer from a mental illness? Will he really head back to his alien home planet? If you’ve seen the movie with Kevin Spacey, that’s a start, but the book is better and there are sequels. It’s told from the psychiatrist’s point of view so we get a lot of background on him and how he relates to Prot. Does he want to believe? You could call it “soft sci-fic” or what I call “social science fiction,” but how about just Popular Fiction?

3. Ratner’s Star by Don DeLillo

Another novel from the Seventies, this is a big sprawling novel that reminds me of Infinite Jest. A teen mathematician is a prodigy and wins the Novel Prize in Mathematics. He is spirited away to help decipher a mysterious message from aliens. You either love books like this or you hate them. DeLillo is a master postmodernist novelist and his work is typically classified as Literature and has been a finalist for the Pulitzer. I doubt he would call this book sci-fi.

4. The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell

In the 21^st Century, Earth receives messages in the form of music from outer space. A Jesuit mission is formed and sent to the planet Rakhat where the music originated. The team’s leader, Father Sandoz, is captured, held as a slave and then eventually returned to Earth, physically disfigured and alone. The science in this book is minimal; it’s more about religion and philosophy and how we treat each other. A book that should be read far more widely than it currently is. Definitely Literary Fiction.

5. The Giver by Lois Lowry

In a world (our future? Or another planet’s?) where complex emotions have been eliminated and all roles are assigned, a young man is set to become the receiver of memories. A dystopian utopia, Lowry very specifically does not name anything after our current world. Therefore, these human-like characters could indeed be aliens.

6. Stitching Snow by RC Lewis

This is a retelling of the Snow White fairy tale with our heroine, Essie, a butt-kicking princess on a frozen planet. (No, this isn’t the movie Frozen but it is a book from Disney’s publishing arm.) There’s kind of science (in a YA sort of way) but mostly romance and adventure (in a YA sort of way). And funny sidekicks! Call this a Fairy Tale Adaptation instead.

7. Under the Dome by Stephen King

Overnight a clear, inescapable dome forms over a small town. Where did it come from? Who put it there? Will we ever get to season two? Oh sorry, that was the television show. As in true King fashion, this is far more horror than it is science fiction, even though it does feature visitors from another planet.

8. Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut

Billy Pilgrim has become unstuck in time. Without warning, although usually at times of great stress, he will suddenly be transported through time and space and experience events that have already happened or will happen. He knows how and when he will die. He knows how and when others will too. He is also abducted by a spaceship and placed in an alien zoo. And thus ends my attempt to write like Vonnegut. This is classic Literary Fiction. Science is not remotely a part of it.

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Eight Days on Planet Earth by Cat Jordan
Published by HarperTeen on November 7th 2017
Pages: 352

How long does it take to travel 13 light-years to Earth?How long does it take to fall in love?

To the universe, eight days is a mere blip—but to Matty Jones, it may be just enough time to change his life.

On the hot summer day Matty’s dad leaves for good, a strange girl suddenly appears in the empty field next to the Jones farm—the very field in rural Pennsylvania where a spaceship supposedly landed fifty years ago. She is uniquely beautiful, sweet, and smart, and she tells Matty she’s waiting for her spaceship to return to pick her up.

Of course she is.

Matty has heard all the impossible UFO stories for all of his seventeen years: the conspiracy theories, the wild rumors, the crazy belief in life beyond the stars. As a kid, he searched the skies with his dad and studied the constellations. But all that is behind him now. Dad’s gone and Matty’s stuck.

But now there is Priya. The self-proclaimed alien girl. She must be crazy or high, right?

As Matty unravels the mystery of Priya, he realizes there is far more to her than he first imagined. And if he can learn to believe in what he can’t see: the universe, aliens…love…then maybe the impossible is possible, after all.

 

This book was really cute- and quite unexpected! When I first started it, I think I expected it to be a certain… way. I don’t want to say much, because spoilers. At first, I was a little wary. In fact, I didn’t really like Matty, the main character, at all in the beginning. He treated his mom like she was overreacting about the loss of her marriage, and he was kind of a jerk to his best friend at times. But luckily, Matty undergoes a significant amount of character development during the course of the story, so I needn’t have worried.

I loved the mystery surrounding Priya, and how Matty just couldn’t help but fall for her, even though he was unconvinced of her story of being an alien being. What I really enjoyed the most though was watching Matty evolve and learn a lot of hard lessons about growing up. He grew to realize that his parents were human, and there’s really no turning back from that. He learned empathy, and he learned to walk in other people’s shoes. But more than anything, the ending of this book wholly blew me away. I will say no more than that, but if you’re a person who worries about lackluster endings (I know I am!) I promise that this book will not disappoint.

Bonus points: It is set in small-town Pennsylvania. Of course I was giddy about that.

Do you have a favorite book with aliens that is not science fiction? I adore this topic, so I hope you do!