3.5
The Man Who Fell to Earth
By Walter TevisPublisher Description
The “beautiful” novel that inspired the Showtime series, from a Nebula Award finalist (The New York Times).
The Man Who Fell to Earth tells the story of Thomas Jerome Newton, an alien disguised as a human who comes to Earth on a mission to save his people. Devastated by nuclear war, his home planet, Anthea, is no longer habitable. Newton lands in Kentucky and starts patenting Anthean technology—amassing the fortune he needs to build a spaceship that will bring the last three hundred Anthean survivors to Earth.
But instead of the help he seeks, he finds only self-destruction, sinking into alcoholism and abandoning his spaceship, in this poignant story about the human condition—which has inspired both a film starring David Bowie and the new series starring Chiwetel Ejiofor—by the acclaimed author of Mockingbird.
“Beautiful science fiction . . . The story of an extraterrestrial visitor from another planet is designed mainly to say something about life on this one.” —The New York Times
“An utterly realistic novel about an alien human on Earth . . . Realistic enough to become a metaphor for something inside us all, some existential loneliness.” —Norman Spinrad, author of The Iron Dream
“Those who know The Man Who Fell to Earth only from the film version are missing something. This is one of the finest science fiction novels of its period.” —J. R. Dunn, author of This Side of Judgment
The Man Who Fell to Earth tells the story of Thomas Jerome Newton, an alien disguised as a human who comes to Earth on a mission to save his people. Devastated by nuclear war, his home planet, Anthea, is no longer habitable. Newton lands in Kentucky and starts patenting Anthean technology—amassing the fortune he needs to build a spaceship that will bring the last three hundred Anthean survivors to Earth.
But instead of the help he seeks, he finds only self-destruction, sinking into alcoholism and abandoning his spaceship, in this poignant story about the human condition—which has inspired both a film starring David Bowie and the new series starring Chiwetel Ejiofor—by the acclaimed author of Mockingbird.
“Beautiful science fiction . . . The story of an extraterrestrial visitor from another planet is designed mainly to say something about life on this one.” —The New York Times
“An utterly realistic novel about an alien human on Earth . . . Realistic enough to become a metaphor for something inside us all, some existential loneliness.” —Norman Spinrad, author of The Iron Dream
“Those who know The Man Who Fell to Earth only from the film version are missing something. This is one of the finest science fiction novels of its period.” —J. R. Dunn, author of This Side of Judgment
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communities130 Reviews
3.5
Nita
Created 10 days agoShare
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“3.5
The first half is really dragging, especially in Prof. Bryce's POV.
The ending is really sad though, the alien finding himself more human that he wants to be. The loneliness he felt as the only one being who is different. It must have been difficult”
graham
Created 12 days agoShare
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“a story of misunderstandings and constant restraint. i admired the references made to other works—its cultural awareness never feeling forced. there’s an underlying sense of the novel itself being an intercepted transcript, some letter from extraterrestrial life. both universal and insular, my heart soars and searches. a near perfect novel.”
BelievableLikeableSteady pacingRealisticEasy to readStraightforward
Chanel Chapters
Created 18 days agoShare
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“A David Bowie-like cat-loving alien comes to earth to save us and his own people but comes to trouble when he loses his alien-ness to the influence of humanity.
Themes of isolation, addiction, belonging and what it means to be human.”
Substance abuseUnsatisfying conclusionBleakOtherworldlySimplistic
winniek
Created 21 days agoShare
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“devastating”
Philip King
Created about 2 months agoShare
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About Walter Tevis
Walter Tevis was born in San Francisco in 1928 and lived in the Sunset District, close to Golden Gate Park and the sea, for the first ten years of his life. At the age of ten his parents placed him in the Stanford Children’s Convalescent Home for a year, during which time they returned to Kentucky, where the Tevis family had been given an early grant of land in Madison County. Walter traveled across country alone by train at the age of eleven to rejoin his family and felt the shock of entering Appalachian culture when he enrolled in the local school. He made friends with Toby Kavanaugh, a fellow student at the Lexington high school, and learned to shoot pool on the table of the recreation room in the Kavanaugh mansion, and to read science fiction books for the first time in Toby’s small library. They remained lifelong friends, and Toby grew up to become the owner of a pool room in Lexington. At the age of seventeen, Walter became a carpenter’s mate in the Navy, serving on board the USS Hamil in Okinawa. After his discharge, he studied at the University of Kentucky where he received B.A. and M.A. degrees in English Literature and studied with Abe Guthrie, author of The Big Sky. Upon graduation he taught everything from the sciences and English to physical education in small-town Kentucky high schools. At that time he began writing short stories, which were published in the Saturday Evening Post, Esquire, Redbook, Cosmopolitan, and Playboy. He wrote his first novel, The Hustler, which was published in 1959, and followed that with The Man Who Fell to Earth, which was published in 1963. He taught English literature and creative writing at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio for fourteen years, where he was a distinguished professor, and left that post in 1978 to come to New York and resume writing. He wrote four more novels—Mockingbird, The Steps of the Sun, The Queen’s Gambit and The Color of Money—and a collection of short stories, Far From Home. He died of lung cancer in 1984. His books have been translated into French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, Icelandic, Greek, Slovak, Serbo-Croatian, Israeli, Turkish, Japanese, and Thai.
Other books by Walter Tevis
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