"Shadows in the Sun" by Chad Oliver

Anthropologist Paul Ellery is doing a study of Jefferson Springs, Texas, population 6,000: a perfectly ordinary-seeming small American town. But things don't quite ring true; and, after observing a spaceship landing, he realizes that the townsfolk are humans not of this Earth: they're colonists deposited by an advanced galactic human civilization, and they regard Earth humans as primitive savages, destined to be confined to reservations, i.e., cities. The reason the aliens are here, Ellery learns from the colonists' higher-ups, is that for all their advanced culture the galactics have failed to solve the problem of overpopulation! So they dump some of the excess on backward, ""underpopulated"" planets like Earth. Later, having been introduced to the lesser marvels of galactic civilization, Ellery faces a threefold dilemma. Should he try to warn the Earth (but who would believe him)? Join the galactics (and forever lose his Earth perspective)? Or reject the galactics' offer and stay quietly at home, confident that Earth one day will develop an advanced culture of its own? (Kirkus Review)

I thoroughly enjoyed this book for several reasons, some typical and some not so. First, let me explain how I encountered this book. This past weekend was Father’s Day, and my wife’s present to me was a trip to the Rare Editions section of our favorite Half Price Books store. I found an inscribed edition of this book written by the professor I took Intro to Anthropology from back in the mid-70s at UT Austin and I couldn’t pass it up. I knew at the time he was an SF author but I have never read any of his work until now. Well, I am delighted to have finally remedied that unconscionable lapse! But the story (my story with this book) is deeper than that. Two years ago I started serious work on a novel about a man who discovers he may be part or wholly alien set in East Texas. Finding this book, about an anthropologist who discovers that aliens, colonists, have taken over a West Texas town, is just too much of a coincidence. Add to that the fact that Oliver published this book the year I was born. Someone could easily read into the situation that my encountering this book at this time in my life goes beyond coincidence and flirts heavily with synchronicity.

Okay, now for some review. The story departs from the garish alien-as-superman, bug-eyed-monsters kind of science fiction that many people today think most 40s and 50s SF was like. Later, the 60s and 70s would usher in a “new wave” of SF more thoughtful and less stereotypical, less focused on UFOs and the awaiting disaster of nuclear Armageddon that so obsessed the SF culture of the 50s. Shadows in the Sun is a precursor to that “new wave” in that it posits some serious, intelligent questions about the nature of humanity and takes a more nuanced approach to speculating about what first contact might be like. Some reviewers have shied away from calling this book a classic. Well, that may well be because it was ahead of its time. Granted it’s not on a par, perhaps, with More Than Human by Spurgeon, The Shrinking Man by Matheson, The Big Time by Leiber, anything from that era by Ray Bradbury or Robert Heinlein, or may others, but, shall we say, it is an important book, because it is the first or at least one of the first to tackle the thorny issues of humanity right here on Earth in a contemporary time and setting, and do so in a thought-provoking and memorable way.  (Mike Austin, GoodReads)