Book: V – The Chicago Conversion

V: The Mini-series was a ground breaking TV show for it’s time and I was obsessed with it. Not only was it sci-fi but it was also a parallel of WWII and the rise of the Third Reich – something I was really into and still am. I fell in love with the first mini-series and the second was satisfyingly enough for me. The TV series that followed was a little more than disappointing and in the end, I kind of wished that they either ended it with The Final Battle or maybe left it a little more open ended then they did.

In my last review of The Alien Swordsman, I said that many of these authors probably did not care or respect the source material. In the case of The Chicago Conversion, that does not appear to be entirely true. However, there is a trade off to that and it is quite obvious in this book. This book was one man’s story against all odds to stop a Visitor plot. he had help here and there but in the end, it was his lone quest to stop the evil aliens.

As compared to The Alien Swordsman, this story is not as epic and is pretty straight forward. We first meet Sam Walker and his girl friend, Kathleen, both thrown together after escaping the Visitor purge of their little town outside of Chicago. The towns people were all herded like cattle into the Visitor ships and stored for food. Instead of joining the resistance, Sam and Kathleen chose to stay out of it and wait until it blew over, hiding in an old horse race track outside Chicago.

The plot is actually really simple. It also addresses a major plot hole in the original mini-series. The plot hole is the anti-toxin the resistance gave out to the Fifth Column. Why didn’t the Visitors either get ahold of a sample or develop their own? I suppose that was at the core of the TV series to follow but that wasn’t really stressed in the show. In this book, 200 shock-troopers stumbled across a small stockpile of the anti-toxin and take it, only assuming what it was. Now the Visitor scientist could not seem to isolate it from the soldiers bloodstreams but it was only a matter of time. 300 years more advanced than Earth, you would think they could, right?

Sam Walker is the main character who goes through a lot of hardship, loss and pain to stop the Visitors plot. The book kind of implies that the Visitors were performing a mass scale conversion but that’s not really the case. It does illustrate the insidiousness of the Conversion process in that it only takes one conversion to say the masses.

So in end, the story is one man who tried to stay out of the war with the Visitors only to be drawn in as the Visitors try to keep a thin grip on the holdings they had, despite the poisonous atmosphere. He goes through a few encounters – his pregnant girlfriend dying at the hands of the Visitors, capture and attempted conversion, working with the Fifth Column to escape, learning of the plot to convert the new leader of Chicago and stopping the plot to do so. All while at the same time, dealing with the immune shocktroopers and coming up with a way to wipe them out, lessoning the chance of the Visitors learning of an anti-toxin.

While this book was very simple in concept and at times a little wordy for the mundane things, it really did capture the essence of the Visitor invasion, the Visitors themselves and the continued battle against the converted humans on Earth.