Yesterday's Kin

A decent, workaday novella in the vein of old school sci-fi. Aliens come, informing us that they come in peace and, by the way, there's a giant space cloud full of spores carrying a Spanish Influenza/Ebola-type disaster on its way. Yo, should we share science or whatever? Scientists work round the clock in fancy alien-funded labs, collaborating with mysterious alien scientists who seem to do little work. Aliens are tall, skinny human types.

Protagonist is nice middle-aged scientist woman - in other words, a unicorn emerging from a rainbow. Obvs to be portrayed by Meryl Streep in my head. LUV YA, MERYL. Anyway, so Meryl-protagonist has three grown kids, who are all sorts of a mess. Insert family drama. Insert some family drama which begins to strain credulity, verging into soap opera towards the end. Youngest, misfit son is Noah, addicted to a very benign-seeming drug and generally just a sensitive, scrappy 20something with a heart o' gold. Meryltagonist has a gay science friend, Evan, who is gay, we are mysteriously reminded a few times (gay!).

Big let-down anticlimax with a kinda stuffy moral overtone, which is typical of these things, it seems (War of the Worlds, that one Arthur C. Clarke book also about high-minded aliens from afar, etc...).