Little Green Men: A Novel - Hardcover

Buckley, Christopher

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679452931 ISBN 13: 9780679452935

Publisher: Random House, 1999

Synopsis

In 1994, Christopher Buckley published one of the most acclaimed and successful comic novels of the decade, Thank You for Smoking. Now Buckley returns to the strange land of Washington, D.C., in Little Green Men, a millennial comedy of manners about aliens and pundits . . . and how much they have in common.
        
The reluctant hero of this hilarious novel is John Oliver Banion, a stuffy Washington talk-show host, whose privileged life is thrown into upheaval when aliens abduct him from his exclusive country-club golf course.
        
But were his gray-skinned captors aliens . . . or something far more sinister? After Banion is abducted again--this time in Palm Springs--he believes he has been chosen by the extraterrestrials to champion the most important cause of the millennium, and he embarks on a crusade, appearing before a convention of UFO believers and demanding that Congress and the White House seriously investigate UFOs. His friends and family suspect that Banion is having some kind of manic-depressive midlife crisis and urge him to seek therapy before his credibility as a pillar of the punditocracy is ruined.
        
So John Oliver Banion must choose: keep his establishment status or become the leader of millions of impassioned and somewhat scruffy new friends who want to expose the government's secret alien agenda.
        
Little Green Men proves once and for all that the truth is out there. Way out there. And it reaffirms Christopher Buckley's status as the funniest humanoid writer in the universe.
Coming soon from Christopher Buckley:   One of Our Whales Is Missing

About this title

Review

In Christopher Buckley's hilarious fourth novel, Washington, D.C., is naturally enough a place of sex, lies, and videotape. Unfortunately for Little Green Men's pundit protagonist, John Oliver Banion, it is also the HQ of Majestic Twelve, a very, very covert government project. Since "that golden Cold War summer of 1947," MJ-12 has had a single mission--to convince taxpayers that space invaders are constantly lurking below what's left of the ozone layer. "A country convinced that little green men were hovering over the rooftops was inclined to vote yea for big weapons and space programs," the author thoughtfully explains.

But one disgruntled operative wants out. Nathan Scrubbs is fed up to the back teeth with the art of alien abduction--not to mention his cover as a Social Security flunky--so when his request for a transfer is quashed, he drunkenly decides to take it out on ubiquitous ultra-prig Banion, who happens to be on TV at the time. The ensuing high-tech kidnap, at Maryland's Burning Bush Country Club, is only one of the thousands of convulsively funny scenes in Little Green Men. Not that the novel isn't a skewed morality play of some sort: as Banion comes to believe in Tall Nordics and Short Ugly Grays, he is quickly removed from every A-list in town. But oddly enough, social and political disaster turns out to be as liberating as the finest alien probe. Let's just say that long before Banion and Scrubbs have a close encounter at the Millennium Man March on Washington, this Beltway barrel of monkeys attains a truly extraplanetary level of amusement. --Kerry Fried

From the Back Cover

"Little Green Men is a delicious, ingenious treat. Christopher Buckley is an author of many talents, with a range of abilities that includes a penetrating comic intelligence and a deft flair for storytelling that makes this novel a truly joyous page-turner."
-Joseph Heller

What distinguished literary critics are saying about Christopher Buckley

"One of the best and surest political humorists in America."
-Los Angeles Times Book Review

"One of the rarest specimens, the authentically comic writer."
-The Boston Globe

"One of the best social satirists of his generation."
-The Philadelphia Inquirer

"A superb writer of politically incorrect satire."
-Entertainment Weekly

"Washington's pre-eminent satirist."
-The Washington Monthly

"A smoother, funnier and more refined heir apparent to Art Buchwald's throne."
-Publishers Weekly

About this edition

• Publisher: Random House
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0679452931
• ISBN 13: 9780679452935
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 300