Ok, so out of the blue we jump ahead two years! Things have changed greatly around the little house on the hill in Veil, Colorado. As you’ll recall, Piper had just come back and was calling out her family and associates from the underground bunker. She did that to save their lives, I guess, because the aliens, then blasted a big hole in the earth where the house and bunker used to be. I believe that’s the way it went, but since we weren’t there and the story doesn’t say what happened after that, we’ll just have to fill in the blanks.
Apparently, Meyer Dempsey is also back. He’s now “in-charge” of humanity via some unknown ability to communicate directly (or indirectly) with the aliens. Oh, yeah, they are now called the “Astrals”. There are at least three classes of Astrals, the Divinity who never, ever leave the ship and they usually are the ones thinking of Meyer, the Titans, who are huge, powerfully built pacifist, and the Reptars who just tear people to pieces, but are otherwise known as the Peacekeepers!
Meyer Dempsey and his family, including Raj, Christopher, and Terrance now live in a huge compound from which he directs humanity to do what the Astrals want or else! The “else” part means you die if you don’t do what you’re told. Other than that, humanity can get back to the business of living and dying naturally if they want. So, the Dempsey’s and anyone living in the Heaven’s Veil are considered collaborators with Earth’s conquerors and are targets of the small, but the growing resistance movement. Heaven’s Veil is under attack on many occasions, but the rebels are usually ineffective against the Astrals and are usually dead right after a failed attack.
The Astrals are looking for something on or in the earth and they don’t understand what has happened to humanity since their last visit. The Astrals are a group-think species. They all share the same thoughts, feelings, emotions and other such stuff. Humanity of old, when religion was strong and made everyone believe the same things almost made humans very much like the Astrals. Not any more! They have found humans to be much more individualistic and that they don’t understand.
Well, this is all pretty weird and kind of hard to understand. I don’t understand how Meyer Dempsey can get things done when there isn’t much of a dialogue with the aliens at any point in this book. And, he doesn’t actually do anything in this part of the story. He’s just there as the Viceroy for the aliens and everyone else seems to be afraid of him and the aliens, but they don’t do much in this story either.
In fact, there isn’t much of anything really going on in this story. We do meet the leader of the Outlands, Nathan Andreus. He’s supposed to be a bad guy, but he doesn’t actually do anything bad in this book. He actually gets involved in helping everyone out at the end. At the end of the book it gets kind of exciting when we find out the true nature of the Titans, but that part goes by pretty quickly and then we’re wondering what’s next.
Oh, yeah, Meyer Dempsey gets killed. I think; not sure about that. Good book, but not sure why it was called “Colonization”?