This is my first sci-fi book review and consequently it isn’t likely to be very good. How fitting then that it should be about a book that isn’t very well written. There’s a lot of action in it which is OK but never great and there is a love affair that is very thin indeed. Just as well science fiction isn’t all about the writing! Introduce a new idea, or maybe popularise or develop an old one and that’s a contribution to the cultural and intellectual wealth of humankind right? Now how many movies and TV episodes have we seen in which a plague is delivered via a space ship to the unexpecting denizens of some future land? If you’re me you’ve seen quite a few. Do these stories owe their existence to this book published in 1965? Google suggests not. Apparently there was a TV series called Tales of Tomorrow with an episode in 1952 called Plague from Space (see http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0717040/ ) that appears to be built around a rather similar idea. And I reckon there’s a pretty good chance the storyline was hanging around before then. This is an interesting case study on how hard it can be…