Stan Morgan, turbo-geek, is part of a NASA team sent to make contact with the aliens and determine if they constitute a threat to Earth. It doesn't take Stan long to realize just how difficult this is going to be. Not only are there no aliens in sight, but every piece of electronic equipment the humans brought has quit working. Worse, he is in a huge crowd of displaced people who will soon need food, water, and some kind of organization to prevent violent chaos.

This is certainly an intriguing opening, and Alison Sinclair follows up with a solid novel. The tale is told primarily through the viewpoints of four Americans: Stan Morgan, Sophie Hemmingway (a pathologist), Stan's niece Hathaway (a pregnant, rebellious 17-year-old), and Stephen Cooper, an emotionally disturbed man on the run from a murder warrant.

Sinclair's protagonists are well portrayed and supported by a solid cast of secondary characters. (I was especially delighted with Marian, a tough-minded English octogenarian who fought in World War II and still carries a Walther PPK under her tweed skirt.) Sinclair also does a detailed and accurate job with the hard science background as her characters struggle to explore a completely alien environment with only a few old-fashioned tools and their ingenuity. Finally, her alien environment is satisfyingly strange and cryptic.

Cavalcade is, in some regards, a formula 'disaster' novel (a cast of diverse characters bands together to survive the tornado/towering inferno/apocalypse/whatever) and I occasionally found characters or events to be just a little too pat; nonetheless it was a compelling and intelligent read, far above average for most SF. Tellingly, the praise quote on the jacket of this book is not from the literary press, but from New Scientist magazine.