Breakaway Books

Authored by Ilana Masad; Published September 2025; Science Fiction

⭐️⭐️⭐️ / 🏖️

I’m not at all sure I should classify Beings as science fiction. The focus on aliens is definitively secondary to the societal reaction to the supposed abductees and to American LGBTQ history in the second half of the twentieth century.

Beings is narrated by an archivist as she puts together documents related to three seemingly unrelated subjects: the correspondence of a female science fiction writer Phyllis Egerton, the journal of newspaper copy editor struggling with her sexuality, and the experience of an interracial couple who claims to have been abducted by aliens in New England. The storylines are connected only by a tenuous thread through the archivist’s work as they explore society’s reaction to the somewhat unbelievable story told by the abducted pair. But the emotional center of the novel seems to be the archivist’s fascination with Egerton’s escape from a family who shuns her and how she begins to live as a lesbian.

I didn’t have any trouble getting through this book—I was terribly interested to know if the New England couple was ever able to prove they were abducted and how the public ended up receiving their story—but looking back on it, I am confused at how these stories hang together. No traditional narrative structure dictates any of the storylines, and the connections between them never tighten to the point of convergence. When I try to sum up the novel in just a few sentences, I end up muddling through a confusing explanation of the weak connection between the archivist, Phyllis Egerton, and her paper’s coverage of the abducted couple. It didn’t leave me satisfied.

But as a reflection of a very specific slice of history, Beings is fascinating. I found that I didn’t care all that much if the aliens made a repeat appearance; instead, I wanted to know if Phyllis would find a happy ending, either with a partner or without one, especially after watching her suffer through two horrible relationships. I wanted to know if the couple that was abducted would manage to scrape through the media barrage that naturally accompanied the publication of a book narrating their extraterrestrial encounter. Basically, I was drawn in by the stories of the real people more than the question of whether the aliens they met were real and how reliable their accounts were. It made for a good read, but it wasn’t at all about the aliens for me. 

Beings probably isn’t the sci-fi novel you want, but it’s a good piece of recent historical fiction.