I finished reading Contact with Chaos by friend of IMAO Mike Z. Williamson, and it’s quite a departure from his previous novels in his Freehold universe. While they’ve been military SF (and his last book — which I really enjoyed — was kinda like an action move), this is more traditional hard SF with like actual science and stuff. For someone still aspiring to write a novel one day, it’s actually pretty intimidating because it looked like a lot of hard work. He wrote most of it while sick while deployed and did actual research talking to scientists with lab coats and everything. I want to write scifi so I don’t have to do research and can just make stuff up.

Anyway, I was too excited to read this novel at first because it seems like first contact with a sentient alien species has been done to death, but I had never seen it like this and was hooked after the first chapter. Not to give too much away, but the alien species due to their planetary conditions have been stuck in basically the stone age by lack of metals while still becoming culturally quite advanced. This creates challenges for the human visitors who want to establish relations with them while not completely upsetting their society with a rapid introduction of new technology. Actually, it sounds kinda boring from my description, but I really really enjoyed it. I think it’s my favorite novel of Mike’s so far and I really hope there is going to be a sequel.

Interestingly, the U.N. is one of the good guys in this novel and its the capitalists who cause most of the trouble trying to quickly establish trade deals with the natives. Next an Obama like character is going to lead Freehold away from its harsh libertarian principles. I kid! Actually, with the liberal fascist U.N. which rules Earth and numerous other planets being the main villain in many of the other novels, it was nice to have a change of pace.

So, I like the novel a lot, and if you like science fiction and are literate, you should give it a try. It’s available now from Amazon and should be in bookstores within the week. Here’s another review from Laughing Wolf at Blackfive and here is the first five chapters available for free so you can decide for yourself (which is stupid because I already decided for you).