[Thomas J. Newton was a man, of sorts, but not the sort one finds very often in rural Kentucky. He looked and acted human enough to pass for a freak, eccentric, and genius -- for awhile, at least. He knew himself to be an Anthean, the only one of his race on Earth at the time. His sense of self was changing however -- suffering, perhaps -- from his immersion in the native culture. In some respects he was very different from the clumsy, self-destructive, passionate, foolish citizens of this world; in other respects, however, he was becoming alarmingly like them.
   The Man Who Fell to Earth is a thoughtful and absorbing story of a man and his plans gone awry. It is made all the more interesting by the not-exactly-human nature of our man. Tevis lovingly articulates Thomas Newton's intellectual, physical and emotional relationship to the alien world he falls into, and to its inhabitants. We, in turn, discover the tension between our relatedness to Newton's experience, on the one hand, and to the experiences of a couple of his earth-born associates, on the other. We also learn much of the contrast between our world and Newton's home world of Anthea, which reminds us of our world, different as it is.
   This book was written at the height of Cold War jitters, in 1963 -- in the still-fresh shadows of the 1961 Bay of Pigs debacle and the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. It is very much a product of its time but should not be dismissed as a period piece. The story it tells won't seem 'dated' anytime soon.   - WA, 30 Dec 97.]

[ ] How similar and different is the film, featuring David Bowie as Newton?

   He began to feel what he had sometimes felt before: a heavy lassitude, a world-weariness, a profound fatigue with this busy, busy, destructive world and all its chittering noises. He felt as though he could give the whole thing up, that it was foolish, impossibly foolish to have started it, more than twenty years before. He looked around him again, tiredly. What was he doing here -- here on this other world, third from the sun, a hundred million miles from his home? He got up and turned the television set off, and then sat back deeply in the chair, still drinking the wine, feeling the alcohol now and not caring.
   He had watched American, British and Russian television for fifteen years. His colleagues had collected a huge library of monitored and recorded television broadcasts, and by the time, forty years ago, when America had begun continuous television broadcasting, they had already deciphered most of the subtleties of the language from FM radio broadcasts. He had studied daily, learned the language, the manners, the history and geography, until he had memorized, by means of exhaustive cross-referencing, the meaning of obscure words like "yellow", "Waterloo" and "Democratic Rebublic" -- the last a thing which had no counterpart whatsoever on Anthea. And, while he had worked and studied and done endless physical exercises, while he agonized in anticipation for years, they had deliberated, deciding whether the trip should even be attempted. There was so little power, other than the solar batteries in the desert. It would require so much fuel to send even one Anthean across the empty gulf, possibly to his death, possibly to be received by an already dead world, a world which might by then be, like so much of Anthea itself, littered with atomic rubble, the burnt-out residue of apelike wrath. But they had told him, finally, that the trip would be attempted, in one of the old, old craft that still remained underground. He was informed a year before the journey that the plans at last were definite, that the ship would be ready when the planets had assumed the right position for the crossing. He had not been able to control the trembling of his hands, when he had told his wife of the decision...

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