Yesterday's Kin

Yesterday's Kin is the story about the world experiencing the visit of aliens for the first time. In the story, an object sits right in the city of the New York Harbor that had been mistaken first as an asteroid. After realizing it had been an alien ship the reaction of people was incredulous. The author had described how realistically people would react to the arrival of aliens from another planet. The world had armed forces increased along with communication devices. Many religions had declared and preached constantly that the end of the world was near. Markets were out of control; crashing and rising up constantly. Suicide rates had gone up, some had riots throughout while others had celebrated in the arrival of aliens and even sent up balloons with kind letters as a warm welcome to the planet. With all of this going on, the protagonist, a mother of three whom is trying to balance out her broken family and her work that has caught the attention and was greatly celebrated for its achievements.

Dr. Marianne Jenner, a geneticist, published a paper on scientific findings on Mitochondrial DNA which is a substance that exists in every cell of your body and is a source of power to the cells. Marianne's paper explains about how the mutation of Mitochondrial DNA at a balanced rate every 10,000 years which is called the "control region". Her explanation of mutations that that are possible in constructing a tree of descent that came from a female ancestor baffled many and caught the attention of the alien. The alien, when arrived had promised their knowledge of physics and their way of life in exchange for being allowed to build the Embassy which was the floating pavilion inside New York Harbor. It was a male, and had decided to adopt the name of "Ambassador Smith" and contained machines in the room used to communicate in English with the humans. Smith had wanted to meet Marianne because of her new discoveries on the Mitochondrial DNA because it turned out the alien's race was the same as an ordinary human being. Yet the evolutionary changes were different and because of their world that lacked light, is warmer, and dark plants grow these "aliens" had adjusted to their world and thus making them look far more different than an ordinary human. Smith, although he was fascinated by Marianne's work; his main reason to be here was to save Earth from destruction.

What I love most about this book is that Kress describes things in the story with very few words and it makes it easier and more understandable for people who don't have that much connection with scientific explanations. What I had enjoyed from the book is how it shows the changes of our world when an alien would come visit Earth. To this day, there had been no visits of others from another planet. Today, there are so many hypotheses, explanations, and even bits of history that people use to try and explain whether or not we are alone in this Universe. In the story, she explains how our world would react and how she predicted that stock markets would go up and crash constantly, how Hollywood movies would use that alien visitor for some dangerous monster ready to abduct the Earth with its powers or how religions would predict that the end is near. Kress's thorough details put fears into the reader's minds, that is what I find really eye opening about this story.