The Humans

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In a thousand years, if humans survive that long, everything you know will have been disproved. And replaced by even bigger myths. This was, I would later realise, a planet of things wrapped inside things. Food inside wrappers. Bodies inside clothes. Contempt inside smiles. Everything was hidden away.”

Which is to say: don't kill yourself. Even when the darkness is total. Always know that life is not still. Time is space. You are moving through that galaxy. Wait for the stars.”Andrew Martin, a mathematician at Cambridge University, was married before the alien took his identity. He had a wife, Isobel. Their marriage was in shambles, but they stayed together for the sake of appearances and because Isobel loved him. The two of them were famous in their fields of education, Isobel on history and Andrew on Mathematics, and as authors of bestselling books. He and his family moved to Brighton – a place “where no one really fits in, so almost everyone fits in”, Haig says – in 2015. He and Semple home-school their children, 13-year-old Lucas and 12-year-old Pearl. They had been at school in York, but weren’t particularly enjoying it, and their experiences reminded Haig of his own problems at secondary school in Newark in Nottinghamshire, where as a sensitive teenager he felt isolated and directionless in a tough, sporty environment. Humans, as a rule, don't like mad people unless they are good at painting, and only then once they are dead. But the definition of mad, on Earth, seems to be very unclear and inconsistent. What is perfectly sane in one era turns out to be insane in another. The earliest humans walked around naked with no problem. Certain humans, in humid rainforests mainly, still do so. So, we must conclude that madness is sometimes a question of time, and sometimes of postcode.

On the note of the plot point where the aliens kill a mathematician to slow down advancement I found it chilling to see the IRL headline from a week or so ago that a nuclear scientist was killed in Iran (presumably to slow down their program). Fact meets fiction, etc.

Church Times/Canterbury Press:

No one really fits in, so almost everyone fits in’ ... Haig at home in Brighton. Photograph: Sarah Lee/The Guardian

The point was also to forget meaning. To stop looking and start living. The meaning was to hold the hand of someone you cared about and to live inside the present. Past and future were myths. The past was just the present that had died and the future would never exist anyway, because by the time we got to it the future would have turned into the present. The present was all there was.” While the alien was supposed to be a superior being, he went from seeing humans as we see birds or squirrels to seeing the better parts of humans - capacity to love and care for each other. His description of the human and his appalling concern with the nose was very funny. His confusion over having to be clothed likewise. Haig's vampire novel The Radleys was published in 2011. [7] In 2013, he published The Humans. It is the story of an alien who takes the identity of a university lecturer whose work in mathematics

I'm not certain about the narrator being first part (I might have missed it). But when it comes to the second part, the aliens weren't completely against the advancement of humanity..." I enjoyed this story by Matt Haig so much more than his book The Midnight Library (see my review at https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...) that I had a hard time putting it down. His concept of looking at life from the eyes of a nonhuman is extremely well-written. Mental health is dealt with thoughtfully. It is philosophical without being "in-your-face preachy". To like something is to insult it. Love it or hate it. Be passionate. As civilisation advances, so does indifference. It is a disease. Immunise yourself with art. And love. This book is a wonderful, funny, and insightful look at humans from an alien perspective. I thoroughly enjoyed it and highly recommend it.