Fade-Out – Book Review

Fade-Out, written by Patrick Tilley and published in 1975, is a cult classic, first-contact-with-aliens novel. It’s been a steady seller for fifty years and never out of print, according to its publishers. Fade-Out was Tilley’s first published novel, and he went on to write a popular series called The Amtrak Wars. Though Fade-Out isn’t an espionage novel, the CIA are involved.

Fade-Out: Title

The title is based on the Problem archetype, a classic way to generate a title. The fade out is electrical circuits stopping working because of an alternating magnetic field caused by the mysterious object that arrives from space. It’s also a bit of a play on words, as by the end of the novel technological civilisation is threatened with fading out.

(For more on titles, see How to Choose a Title For Your Novel)

Fade-Out: Logline

After an alien probe lands in Montana and begins disrupting radio and electricity around the world, the US government tries to keep the landing a secret while a military-scientific team races to understand the threat to technological civilisation.

(For how to write a logline, see The Killogator Logline Formula)

Fade-Out: Plot Summary

Warning: my reviews contain spoilers. Major spoilers are blacked out like this [blackout]secret[/blackout]. To view them, just select/highlight them.

It’s 1974, and for twenty minutes, all across the world, all radars cease functioning. In the USA, the President and his advisors consider whether a solar storm or some kind of Soviet secret weapon caused the phenomena. The Soviets are equally concerned that it’s an American secret weapon. Soon afterwards, the radio telescope at Jodrell Bank in Great Britain detects a spaceship in high orbit.

The Soviets convince the Americans that the spaceship isn’t theirs. With no other nation having the capability to launch a spaceship that big, the President draws the only plausible conclusion: the spaceship must be extraterrestrial. He orders his troubleshooter, Bob Connors, to put together a task force to investigate.

A couple of days later, before the US Airforce can get a usable picture of the spaceship, it lands in the wilderness of Montana at a place called Crow Ridge. The radar and electrical interference, dubbed ‘the Fade Out’, gets worse. Near Crow Ridge, all electrical devices stop working, causing cars and a helicopter to crash. The spacecraft itself burrows underground. The president gives it the codename ‘Crusoe’ after Robinson Crusoe.

A CIA front-company buys the land, pretending to be drilling for oil. With electrical equipment non-functional, the team uses horses, diesel-engined trucks and steam-powered equipment to start drilling down to Crusoe. They surround it with explosives and, in response, it surfaces, but proves impossible to dig out further. It also appears to be growing. The fade out stops, much to the relief of everyone.

Friday

A spider-like robot probe emerges from Crusoe and is instantly dubbed ‘Friday’. It encounters the team, but appears to be moving around at random. The team investigates the aperture in Crusoe that Friday appeared from and work out how to operate it. They prepare to use the aperture to enter Crusoe. Meanwhile, Friday emerges again. The team attempt to trap it, but fail after it drops its temperature close to absolute zero and emits an extremely strong magnetic field.

The USA discovers that the Soviets have a spaceship identical to Crusoe on their territory. The President and his advisors discuss what to do next, with opinions ranging from leaving Crusoe alone in the hope it completes its mission and leaves, to attempting to destroy it.

The team finally succeed in entering Crusoe. The three men who go in undergo some kind of transcendent, mind-expanding experience and never reappear. One leaves a cryptic message saying there’s no danger and Crusoe solves ‘everything’, but the rest of the team don’t understand the message and assume the three men are dead. In revenge, some of them attack Friday, which results in it self-destructing.

After this, the fade out restarts and Crusoe starts growing rapidly and changing shape, becoming pyramidal. Connors concludes Crusoe must be destroyed, and the president agrees. He sends Connors to Moscow to liaise with the Soviets about simultaneous attacks.

Pyramids of Doom

Meanwhile, changes to the magnetic field of the Earth enable the team to work out that there must be six probes across the globe, including the ones in the USA and the Soviet Union. The other four are underwater and have escaped detection. Some of the team also start to become telepathic. They assume this is Crusoe’s doing and wonder what else it’s planted in their brains.

In Moscow, both sides admit they’ve been lying to each other and agree to attack Crusoe and the Soviet monolith simultaneously, unaware that there are four more.

Crusoe, now pyramid-shaped, is growing rapidly and adding what look like steps around it. Some of the team speculate the monoliths may not be spaceships at all, but may have been lying dormant underground until triggered to emerge by the spaceship.

The area affected by the fade out grows faster and faster, [blackout] prompting the Russians and Americans to bring forward their attacks. The president tries to deliver a television address to the nation, but it fails as the fade out expands to encompass the whole USA. [/blackout]

In desperation, [blackout] the US Air Force flies a B52 bomber with two nuclear weapons on board on a kamikaze mission to attack Crusoe. Because the attack is earlier than planned, the team at Crusoe doesn’t have time to evacuate. Connors witnesses the B52 fly into Crusoe. There is no nuclear explosion. Instead, the B52 vanishes, and Connors has a telepathic experience of it being in space. [/blackout]

Connors and the others [blackout] speculate about what will happen to the world. Technological society is doomed without electricity and there will be mass casualties, but they expect society will eventually stabilise at a lower level.[/blackout]

(For more on summarising stories, see How to Write a Novel Synopsis)

Fade-Out: Analysis
Plot

Fade-Out has a Playing Defence plot (see Spy Novel Plots). The spaceship arrives and resists analysis and the threat it poses keeps changing and getting worse all the way through the story.

The Playing Defence Plot

The Protagonist:

1. Is involved in an Inciting Incident caused by the Antagonist.
2. Makes a plan to stop the Antagonist.
3. Trains and gathers resources to stop the antagonist.
4. Involves one or more Allies in their defence (Optionally, there is a romance sub-plot with one of the Allies).
5. Attempts to prevent the Antagonist’s attack, dealing with further Allies and Enemies as they meet them.
6. Has their plan undercut by the Antagonist attacking differently.
7. Narrowly fails to stop the Antagonist (or stops the Antagonist who then escapes)
8. Has a final confrontation with the Antagonist and stops (or fails to stop) them carrying out their plan.

High Concept

The high concept of Fade-Out is

What if an incomprehensible alien spaceship arrived on Earth?

or if you wanted to do it as a mash up of two movies:

Arrival meets The West Wing

(For more on high concepts, see High concept: How to Discover a Blockbuster.)

Style

The writing in Fade-Out is straightforward, old-school, what-if science-fiction-thriller writing with an omniscient third party narrator and a lot of dialogue. It moves  efficiently, with no pretension to literary merit. It’s probably fair to say that the story is a slow burner, all about the tension of confronting an unknown entity that seems impervious to communication.

Influences

Fade Out reminded me a little of The Black Cloud by Fred Hoyle, another classic alien encounter novel with a hard to understand entity (the titular cloud). Although in The Black Cloud, humanity does eventually establish communication and the alien proves benign.

Another point of reference is the movie Arrival, based on the 1998 short story Story of Your Life by Ted Chiang, as the story is about investigating the extraterrestrials who are hard to understand.

I’d suggest, though, that Arthur C. Clarke’s 1968 blockbuster 2001: A Space Odyssey, with its mysterious monoliths manipulating humanity, alien forces with unexplained agendas and enigmatic ending, was the most powerful influence on Fade Out. Crusoe even appears to be “full of stars”.

Characters

The characters in Fade-Out are desperately thin. There are dozens of interchangeable politicians and military men, so many that Tilley has to resort to a cast list at the start of the novel to help the bemused reader keep track. This is realistic—hundreds or even thousands of people would be involved in a project like establishing contact with an alien spaceship—but it isn’t good storytelling.

The main character, Bob Connors, is probably one of the blandest protagonists I’ve ever read. The only actual attempt to characterise him is that his wife is dead and he’s kind of lost interest in women. Of the other characters, one politician is Jewish, another is a fire-eating Cold War warrior and there’s a reactionary general who, weirdly, becomes telepathic. They’re really all just mouthpieces for the author to expound on the ideas he has. Which brings me on to:

Political Novel or Novel of Ideas?

Because Tilley takes as his protagonists the US President and his advisors, people describe Fade Out a political novel. It’s true that the main characters are politicians who never seem to engage with Crusoe except in terms of what it means for their political careers, and spend most of their time trying to out-manoeuvre each other.

Most of the characters seem more concerned about the Soviets taking advantage of the situation caused by the monoliths than they do about the monoliths themselves. Many of them are such Cold War warriors that they still can’t see anything except the Soviet threat, even with an extraterrestrial entity on their doorstep poised to destroy technological civilisation.

My belief, though, is that Fade Out is a novel of ideas, which is defined as:

A novel in which conversation, intellectual discussion and debate predominate, and in which plot, narrative, emotional conflict and psychological depth in characterisation are limited.

This precisely describes Fade Out. I’ve already discussed the lack of style and the non-existent characterisation. Though it does have a plot, it’s largely a novel where people discuss their ideas about what Crusoe is, how it will affect humanity and what they should do about it.

Dated or Period Piece?

There are a lot of  Cold War attitudes and references to political concerns of the 1970s, such as the energy crisis and monetary crisis in Fade-Out. Also, there’s no diversity whatsoever. All the characters are middle-aged white men. I guess this is fairly accurate for high-echelon government and military leadership in the USA in the mid-nineteen-seventies, but it’s so obvious that Tilley resorts to lampshading it in this scene:

“As a matter of fact, I’m glad there aren’t any women around.” He broke into a laugh.
“What’s so funny?”
“I was just thinking—have you ever noticed how, in all the old science fiction movies, there’s always a girlfriend, wife, daughter, or a niece on holiday, who stumbles across the monster and starts screaming her head off? And when it’s time to run, they’re always wearing high-heeled shoes, and they always fall down and twist their ankle.”
Wedderkind gave him a look of mild reproof. “I fear you’re in the process of becoming what is called a male chauvinist pig.”
“From way back,” said Connors.

In the end, Fade Out is a novel of the mid 1970s and reflects the conventions of the time. These views are offensive to many people these days, but as I’ve noted in many of my reviews like She, The Riddle of the Sands and The Great Impersonation, if you want to enjoy the story you must make allowances for the views of the time.

Fade-Out: The Ending Explained

The ending is certainly a cliffhanger, and an unresolved one at that, as Tilley never wrote a sequel (and died in 2020, so won’t in the future). I like an open ending, but really, Fade Out just leaves it all up in the air with no real conclusion. Amongst the things the novel never explains:

• What is Crusoe?
• Did the spaceship arrive or return to Earth?
• Were Crusoe and the other monoliths already on earth?
• What are Crusoe and the other monoliths trying to do?
• What was Friday trying to do?
• Why did the men who entered Crusoe say there was no danger and it solved ‘everything’?
• Where did the B52 bomber go?
• Did the Russians destroy their monolith (they were using a much bigger bomb)?
• Why are people exposed to Crusoe developing telepathy?
• Is the fade out deliberately being caused by Crusoe, or is it the byproduct of something else it’s doing?

The six monoliths are doing something, but it’s never really clear what exactly. For example, they send out Friday, rearrange the earth’s magnetic field, cause earth tremors, and induce telepathy in some people, though they aren’t mind-controlling them or even sending them intelligible messages. However, as the story sets it up that Crusoe is putting ideas in people’s minds, I think we have to take their guesses in the novel as serious pointers to what happened.

So, it seems:

• Monoliths like Crusoe have been hiding on Earth for millennia, waiting for a signal.
• Receiving the signal from the spaceship, they surfaced.
• The monoliths are way beyond human technology (Turning people telepathic and teleporting a B52 bomber, for example)
• Friday was either a distraction or a test that humanity failed.
• The monoliths are preparing to lead humanity into a new era where we will expand our minds to transcend Earthly boundaries.
• How this will happen is presumably to do with the telepathy that people exposed to Crusoe develop.
• Unfortunately, in the meantime, the fade out means that technological civilisation will collapse as humanity goes back to a pre-Victorian way of life. This will mean millions or even billions of casualties.

Fade-Out: Revised 1987 Edition Differences

The revised edition doesn’t change the story much or resolve the cliffhanger. All it does is remove some of the 1970s references to make it seem a bit more up to date (for the late 1980s). At this point, it just makes the story forty-years out-of-date instead of fifty.

Fade-Out: My Verdict

Leaves the reader with more questions than answers, which perhaps explains its cult status.

Want to Read  It?

Fade-Out is available on US Amazon here and UK Amazon here.

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