[Spoilers, Do Not Read if you do not want to know things from the book]
Short Version: "Rocks fall, everyone dies."
Medium Version: This book ends with aliens depositing the family of the intelligent scientist in Iraq/Babylon in a place called the Garden of Eden after killing all humans on Earth because we suck (and we do.)
Maximum Verbosity: I felt the need to start with how the book ends because the beginning and endings of the novella are the worst part. The book has a lot going for it for the right genre lover but I want to briefly recall an anecdote by my 9th grade English teacher describing how Jaws was basically just like the movie but an exact, badly done replica of Moby Dick and he was so disgusted by it that he literally threw the book out the window and cared not a whit what happened to it.
This book ended that way for me but was a kindle and I'm not throwing my kindle out the window.
Who Will Like It: This book is very much a call to an earlier era of "Forbidden Planet" and "The Day the Earth Stood Still" written in a 3rd person omni present style that, unlike works of fiction from that time, has the courage to go to the natural conclusion of where it should with a story like this.
Who Won't Like It: If you don't like God or Nationalism in your fiction, this book isn't for you. Also there are essentially no named female characters and most definitely does NOT pass the Bectel test.
What Works Best: The aliens are alien. It is a deliberate and compelling choice by the writer to create the aliens as 'aliens' and are not named until they are encountered by the humans. They're believable and while they are often narrated, rather than SHOWN doing things that define their character, they are by far the most interesting part of this novella. Culture is all that matters in a society, and a society of almost immortal beings deciding to help dying planets is a VERY smart premise. Moreover, the fact is that the aliens come to help Earth not out of altruism, not out of rage at what we do to the other sapient creatures of the planet but because of petty extremely believable politics. In other words, we are a means to an end for creatures larger and more intelligent than ourselves. The aliens are higher life forms than us and this book treats them exactly as they should.
I feel that the alien society is so interesting that, despite the fact that I feel the author is still learning their craft, that at some point I would love to revisit them in another work. They are definitely the strongest part of the book and could easily be a whole series of events as Ship 422 moves from dying world to dying world and solves problems in entirely new and exotic ways.
Fly to exotic alien worlds, meet all kinds of interesting natives, and kill most of them.
What Works Least: Aside from the author avatar character, the humans are not really more than cardboard cutouts. But, they are very high definition and well done cardboard cutouts and we have a realistic cast of them. We have the sniveling politician, we have the faceless G-men doing the bidding of the world (yes world) government, and we have the idiotic fruitloop for the US that "Won" world war 3 planning to 'defend' the earth from the aliens as if somehow stand a chance against beings that can cross the cosmos like it was Saturday.
Things That Made Me Go Huh? At one point one of the humans briefs all of humanity that aliens visited the Earth, and it crashed, and that the visiting aliens might be them. They aren't, and while the aliens (Polonians) mention that there are other aliens out there, Earth is supposed to be from a mostly dead section of the universe and decidedly are NOT Greys, so while it is implied that the Polonians have been monitoring Earth for a long time this was a bit of a disconnect.
There is also a bit of a disconnect from the alien's perspective and the time they gave Earth but I can easily chalk that up to Time Dialation and different language used by the aliens.
Broadly speaking, if you like Baen books, I think that this is a good read. I still enjoyed it despite the ending but cannot in good conscience recommend this book WITHOUT mentioning the ending to anyone who might read it. The aliens, justifiably, from their perspective, use what they consider to be Mankind's superstition to help create the mythology. You as reader can determine if it is the Irony of God acting in creation that causes them to literally recreate the bible or if it is actually God acting through higher beings; and the author wisely leaves that up to interpretation despite the personal healing of the wife of the author avatar character.
Oh, and as a side note, the pro-log would have made an entire novella unto itself, potentially with flash backs between the existing chapters, but if you don't mind the equivalent of 6 minutes of Star Wars "pro-log" style prose, then it works just fine. You can skip it and still get most of the story if you simply understand that the Earth is screwed because we (humans) are morons and we put a world Federation together to try and NOT be screwed.
