Emshwiller only started writing when she hit her 80's. Her books are full of interesting observations and quiet wisdom as well as being a really good yarn.

They came as extraterrestrial tourists, but something went wrong and their rides home never showed up. They can pass for human, although they are a little rough around the edges and think all earthlings dress in Hawaiian shirts and Bermuda shorts. And there is a language problem. But they make do. The older generation remains disdainful of our backwards little planet, but the second generation find they kind of like it here. As the parents die off, the diaspora of alien young have to make it on

...The Secret City is a wonderfully understated meditation of being different, of not fitting in. The otherness of the mail characters is constantly present in the narrative and, usually between the lines, they are permanently struggling with it. It is perhaps not the most ambitious science fiction novel ever but the minimalist style and clear language appealed to me...Full Random Comments review

This was first published in 2007, but it feels so much like something written in the 60's, I had to double check to make sure it wasn't. It's a quick read with a fairly straight-forward message. I mostly enjoyed it.

This short novel feels like the desert: sere, lonesome, cool in the shade...an empty quarters book with consolations for the mind-weary. The premise is outrageously provocative, almost surreal, like a Krazy Kat strip.

Rather childlike sci fi about aliens living among the humans.

Weird but strangely compelling. Vivid.

This is the story of a group of humanoid aliens who become stranded while visiting Earth in the guise of tourists. As the wait for rescue stretches into years, they do their best to remain on the outskirts of society, in an attempt to keep their children from becoming enamored of our culture. This breeds a sort of xenophobic contempt among the majority of the aliens.Carol Emshwiller tells her story by switching between first person accounts of the events that befall her main characters. As a maj...

4 stars for novel content.Emshwiller has received mixed reviews, but this one seemed to be most up my alley. As others have said, there is "sci fi" to this book, but it is really a novella about "foreigners" working to survive in a place where they are the minority. Pick a marginalized minority in modern history, and you can apply this book to it. The race of people that don't quite fit in on Earth also might not fit in somewhere else.Emshwiller is spotty on details about the other world, and th...

A tightly written, smooth read, in which second generation aliens await rescue on earth (think Space Mountain) and struggle with identity and where they belong. In 200 pages, the novel covers a lot of ground and contains a variety of scenes: a poignant section where the alien cares for and befriends an elderly woman, a portion where the plot mirrors Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men, and an engaging chapter where one of the aliens returns to her home planet. The protagonists are caught between two wor...

High in the mountains, a city of aliens are living on earth awaiting a trip home. They have been there for awhile. Some of the aliens have integrated with Earthlings in "the down" and live among us. Lorpas is one looking for others of his kind when a rescue party comes and tries to take him home. Communication is poor and things don't turn out well. Soon after, Lorpas does find the secret city where others of his kind are living. He quickly falls in love with Allush. They are soon separated and

The one where the aliens came long ago to vacation on earth and were stranded here, and the home planet finally comes to take the offspring home. Present tense is a tricky choice for a novel, because novels use time in complicated ways -- for instance, they often need to skip ahead to the next interesting part and then loop back briefly to cover what's been left out, which is difficult to do in present tense. I've seen it work -- I think Bright Lights, Big City is in present tense -- but there

After a first chapter that reads like a wonderful and perfect Emshwiller short story - which it turns out it is: 'World of No Return' ('Asimov's Science Fiction', December 2005) - The Secret City turns oddly frustrating oddly quickly, and I can really only blame myself.I'm biased. For some reason - bad genes; bad upbringing; who knows? - I just can't stand it when a long text decides to adopt the rapidly-alternating viewpoints of two or more first-person narrators. It just makes me angry. Especi...

so what would happen if a bunch of mostly-humanoid aliens came here for a tourist junket and got stuck?Emshwiller is not your standard sf writer--she has a lovely humanist way of subverting all your expectations. this book is a surprisingly gentle meditation on difference, on outsiders, on how we can (or fail to) connect across all our differences.this is not a plot-heavy book. things do happen, and they resolve in ways you will not at all foresee. but all the resolutions carry some inevitabilit...

Trying to get unto Sci Fi books, but I didn't get into this one. Didn't follow who was where or why. I kind of got the gist of the book, but what I read did not seem to get that point across interestingly enough.

A group of aliens have lived on Earth for a generation now, blending in, mostly, but keeping themselves apart, posing as tourists, campers, travellers, awaiting the day their people will come for them. One of the second generation, who's lost his family, doesn't fit in on Earth but doesn't think he'll fit in on the home planet, either, but seeking a place he makes his way for the secret city he knows others of his kind have built to await the return.My second Ermshwiller novel, and while I mostl...

Romantic Sci-Fi, it's a whole new genre for me. What can I say... it's beautiful.

I thought this novel was strange and stiff and lovely. A one-star reviewer stymied me with her “negative” comment that the present tense gave the book a dreamy sense of waiting. Agreed, it was exactly spot on. Why is it a negative? They are re all waiting for some impossible future to happen so they only live in the present. Anyway, I enjoyed it thoroughly. It loved the stuff nature of the characters - it added to both their oddness and normality. You’d have to read to understand. A couple of ma...

Okay the prose of this was beautiful but it was a little too slow for my taste and I was running out of time!

This one didn't do much for me. I feel like there's a larger commentary about "the other" here, and class, but the story is so thin that none of the ideas are developed; they're just shadows at the edges.I didn't find much interesting in the characters, our love interests seem so similar as to basically be brother and sister, and all conflicts are resolved immediately. We're given peeks at the mysteries of the home world, but we never see enough to know what was going on. It's not mysterious eno...