Walter Tevis is undoubtedly one of the most gifted writers to have picked the pen. "The Man Who Fell to Earth" was released in 1963 and it makes such an excellent reading that it does not feel like a sixty-year-old novel.

I am a slow reader and it comes as no surprise that even for a 53000-word novel, I take two days or about ten hours. Naturally, whenever I find the going boring, the novel goes on the backburner. Tevis grabs my attention, and this is a brilliant reading. So, what is this sci-fi about?

Apparently, Thomas Jerome Newton has fallen to earth from a distant Anthea planet. He is super-intelligent and tries to set up a smart small world within the world to make money in the fast lane. However, he uses his knowledge of Anthea technologies and make life better for the earthers. He has a purpose for doing it, and that is the purpose for his visit to the planet.

When Newton accidentally ends up with a lady Betty Jo in a lift, his gravity sensitive body cracks up in the slow lift. His leg fractures and that's the moment when Betty restores him to human life. Newton takes the welfare-dependent lady as his secretary and moves to a Kentucky secret lab. Along the while, he draws up Nathan Bryce, a proper academician, as a useful resource for his ambitious project. The chemistry between the three is awesome and so much humane that we lose sight that Newton is an alien.

[SPOILER AHEAD]

FBI and CIA have to invariably get involved in sci-fi, and though they enter in an almost predictable fashion, they do little in impressing the story. I rather with Tevis had allowed Newton to fail because of his shortcomings than the overarching investigators. A botch of FBI undoing Newton dents the reading a bit.

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