According to her website, C.D. Hill-Lavalle, HOW TO CONTROL AN ENTIRE PLANET…in 5 Easy Steps is intended to “heal millions of people, eliminate poverty the world over, bring peace, freedom and justice back to people and save our planet’s resources, wildlife and beauty for generations to come.” That’s quite a mission statement. The first five chapters are purportedly the monologue of a member of an alien race that has successfully conquered a number of planets, including Earth, whose population is “described by many other life-forms as: ‘uneducated bags of mostly water, primitive and savage in their current evolution.’” (No quote ever suffered more from a lack of attribution.) The monologue is a record of this conquest divided into five steps: (1) impress and get invited in; (2) infiltrate, crossbreed, and monitor; (3) set up a single controlling system; (4) educate and perpetuate the system; and (5) avoid threats and dissension. The rest of the book discusses how we humans can overcome this conquest and throw off our oppressors.
Readers will see a variety of influences on this book. One is, of course, Star Trek, especially when the alien narrator speaks of “the law of noninterference” (cf. the Prime Directive) that various conquered planets adhere to. There are also references to a “Galactic Federation,” which are possibly inspired by Haim Eshed, former head of Israel’s Defense Ministry’s space directorate, who in a titillating 2020 interview said there is an “agreement” between the U.S. government and alien members of a “galactic federation” to “do experiments” on Earth. (If that’s true, it doesn’t sound like the “takeover” that Hill-Lavalle describes.) Still another ancestor could be Max Brooks’s The Zombie Survival Guide, a satirical self-help manual, especially when the alien narrator says one of their strategies was to set up banking institutions to “confiscate the planet’s gold supply” and get humans hooked on cheap, easy credit, thereby miring us in debt. Brooks’s humor was subtle but still detectable. Hill-Lavalle is either ten times the satirist Brooks is, or she’s against-all-odds serious. Either way, this melange of New Age sensibilities, crackpot economics, winking (or maybe not!) political fables, and biblical misreadings is impossible to put down.
Possibly the most deadpan satire ever, C.D. Hill-Lavalle’s HOW TO CONTROL AN ENTIRE PLANET…in 5 Easy Steps, makes not one bit of sense, yet is impossible to put down.
~Anthony Aycock for IndieReader