It takes an alien to understand humans. That’s been a sci-fi theme since at least Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land (1961). In Matt Haig’s version of the story, the alien arrives to replace a professor of mathematics who had proven a famous theorem involving prime numbers. Humans are “not ready” for such knowledge, according to the alien, so the discovery must be suppressed.

What happens to the professor is not revealed but he’s gone and the alien assumes his identity and appearance and finds his house and erases the forbidden proof from his computer. Naturally, he also has to kill the professor’s wife, family, and any colleagues who might know about the proof. So it’s an alien serial-killer situation. It could happen!

Living clandestinely among the humans, the alien struggles to make sense of human culture and language while attempting to blend in, with sometimes humorous results. Haig does a good job of having his alien observe and comment on various aspects of human culture, from coffee (vile) to peanut butter (excellent); from sullen teenagers (utterly perplexing), to monogamy (ditto).

Haig’s story is told from the alien’s POV, allowing him to reflect at length on oddities, absurdities, and contradictions of human life. That’s what makes the first third of the book amusing. But how can an author develop a compelling character arc for an alien who, by definition, has a non-human life experience?

Haig handles the problem by having his alien become a virtual human with recognizably human experience. That works, but the dramatic cost is high. It essentially takes the alien out of the story and makes him into a normal though somewhat eccentric person, which defeats the opening impulse of the story.

Indeed, as Haig’s alien becomes a regular family guy, his initial concern over the secret math theorem is forgotten, the family and friends do not have to be killed after all, and the two or three people he already killed are remorselessly forgotten. Worse, as a regular human, the alien’s mind degenerates into hopeless sentimentality and for the last third of the book he does little more than spout anodyne aphorisms about human life, most of them worthy of Hallmark Cards.

While the opening section of the book is well-written and humorous, the momentum is lost as the narrator moves from observational humor to clichés and sentiments (e.g., “love conquers all.” – who knew?).

I’ve never found a way to make the alien the main character for dramatic reasons. Either I’d have to build a huge world and social history and psychology for him or, like Haig’s alien (and most others, like E.T., Starman, I, Robot, etc.,) have him become just an eccentric human, which seems like a cop-out.

So this book counts as psi-fi for the first third, since it focuses on human psychology as seen “from the outside,” but after that, it’s just a story about a “strange uncle,” not even sci-fi, really. This book is a great illustration of the problem, but, I should note, it has been hugely successful with readers.

Haig, Matt (2014). The Humans. New York: Simon & Schuster (320 pp.)