The Coming by  Joe Haldeman

I've liked Joe Haldeman for a long time.  The Forever War, Infinite Dreams, some of his collections are among my all-time favorites.

This story is set in a fairly believable world just a coupla decades from now.   It's an interesting combination of advanced technology against crumbling infrastructure.   In the opening chapters, a reporter is riding up a rickety elevator and is worried about it failing.  And then the door opens and we learn he's accompanyed by automated cameras that take establishing shots unattended and can be voice controlled and respond to gestures.

The message from the aliens pretty much opens the book.  "We're coming."   And that kicks off the media frenzy.  And the political maneuvering.   Wild conspiracy theories.

The main characters are mainly a diverse group of people who just happen to live and work close to each other.  Haldeman would transition from one to another mostly by proximity.  He'd be on one character and another one would enter the scene, and he'd switch to their point of view.  Or, as one walked out of a scene.  That sort of thing.

But, one problem with that was that the characters were a bit too diverse.  That must have broken up the narrative, because it never really flowed for me.  I'd be getting interested in one plot line and another would intrude.  That sort of things works in some novels.  It was great in Red Storm Rising.  But here it was intrusive.

Some of the events at the end of the book seemed a bit of a cop-out.  I kind of got to where it was an impossible situation, so he just killed some of the people.   While some of that could have been an interesting situation on its own, in this context it was jarring and felt out of place.

On Mighty's Total Book Value Scale, Paperback.  Interesting transition technique.  Amazing how little I remember of the story.  It felt like it needed more back-story to understand the political setting.

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