Where do aliens belong? The purist, (or purest) school of sf thought says that aliens are not science fiction because they are not within reach of our extrapolation. The space flight wildly imagined by the scientifiction of the genre's early days was just within the bounds of prediction, and it has duly happened (though so far on a somewhat more modest scale than envisaged). Aliens don't belong in this category. They do not represent a calculable possible development from a known situation. Whether or not they're out there, our own galaxy—in so far as we seem to know it—is such a huge place, interstellar distances so intractable, that in reason we can't expect extraterrestrial contact. Whatever you may think of the logic of this argument, both science fiction and fantasy writers continue to describe the unpredictable encounter with more or less of extrapolative rigour, and bear the reproach of the purists with stoicism. But we have to admit, in every case the aliens are not themselves. They are exploited Third Worlders, Evil Empires, unexplored aspects of the human psyche, devils, angels, elves, characters in a historical romance about foreign travel; perhaps they are ‘the other’. We cannot write about the real aliens until we've met them. Instead we use their name, and talk about something else.

The aliens in Kristine Kathyrn Rusch's Alien Influences have a distinctly nineteenth-century feel. They are native peoples encountered by human colonists in search of raw materials. They smell funny, they look funny, they don't wear proper clothes or live in proper houses. They don't have to be paid when you take their stuff. They are weak and vulnerable and yet also regarded as extremely dangerous. They are perhaps magical but their magic is helpless before the human rush to plunder. In every case they are being decimated: and true to our past though shocking to late twentieth-century sentiment, practically nobody cares.

The title of the novel refers to an instrument (in the legal sense) called the Alien Influences Act, which has recently become law in human space, or at least all of human space that appears in this novel—comprising a disparate collection of space bases, where civilised life happens…