Do you like clear plots and sympathetic characters? Do you relate to the tropes of genre in a similar manner to the signage for a motorway services, as being descriptive of the familiar pleasures one might encounter within? Did you kinda dig the monsters and conspiracies in X Files, but still find the elliptical cultural paradoxes they implied deeply frustrating? Are you annoyed by identity politics, despite not really knowing what it is? Does the word “postmodernism” make you foam at the mouth even as you begin composing a letter to the Times Literary Supplement? If so, dear friend, let your eyes wander around the page a bit; there’s probably something nearby with a comforting rocket on the cover. The work of Douglas Lain is likely not for you.

Despite being a card-carrying postmodernist myself (they’re coming for us shortly after the trade-unionists, I believe, but well before the idolators and fornicators), I’m not entirely sure who it is for. Which is less a diss of Doug than an admission of my epistemological inadequacies: as a postmodernist, you see, I can’t—by definition!—be sure of anything, beyond my inability to be sure of anything. And even that’s questionable… though I’m pretty confident about the stuff in the paragraph above. So if you’re still reading, well, it’s your funeral.

Now, yes: After the Saucers Landed is about aliens landing on the lawn of the White House, and what happened after that. Much of what happened after that transpired to be like something out of a 50s B-movie, featuring massed beamings-up to orbiting craft full of vintage blinkenlights, Aquarian psychobabble and sequinned jumpsuits galore. This is a profound disappointment to career UFO crank Harold Flint, who presumably hoped for something a bit edgier. (It is also aesthetically jarring, as the story seems to be set in the plaid-clad early Nineties.) Anyway, the book is ostensibly narrated by Flint’s co-writer, whose wife has a fling with one of the aliens before sort of trading places with her/it, at which point… ugh. I really wasn’t kidding about the plot issue, OK?

What we get instead of plot is Lain going the full deconstructive monty on classic contactee tropes, artfully and repeatedly reiterating, reversing and collapsing that most well-worn of the genre’s concretised metaphors, the alien-as-Other. But this is way beyond spoofing or pastiche (though there’s a bit of both to be found): Lain’s invasion of kitsch aliens is just a springboard from which to begin a dazzling (and more than occasionally baffling) enquiry into the fluid and immutable nature of identity itself. And I really do mean enquiry: our narrator litters whole paragraphs with meandering thoughts and rhetorical questions, leaving we-the-reader (or at least this reader) just as disoriented as he is, thanks to the phenomenon of Missing Time, which… well, you can probably work that one out for yourself. This disorientation is, I conclude, purposeful: Lain’s text aims to reproduce and interrogate its theme at the level of style and character as well as plot, and succeeds in doing so.

I could give you interpretations, if you want ‘em? Way I see it, the action takes place in the Nineties for a good reason: it was the last period before the internet effectively rendered all conspiracy theories redundant, even as it reseeded and promulgated them all; it was the last period in which we could even try to pretend that objectivity and truth were attainable. The Nineties are when our ideas about identity imploded, see? It was like a singularity, but for networked consciousness: an indelible and collective loss of innocence that, as a culture, we are still a long way off having dealt with. The Nineties were the years in which we finally passed right through the looking-glass; the last years in which it was still possible to disappear, to change, to be discontinuous. The paradox of identity is this: the more fluid it becomes, the more tightly it binds us. The existential horror of postmodernity is perhaps best summed as the cognitive dissonance between your experience of individuality and the inescapable knowledge that you don’t really exist outside of the perceptions others have of you.

Or something like that, anyway. If you read this book, you’ll likely come up with a theory of your own—because this is a book by someone who loves theory, and I think you might struggle with it if you don’t feel the same way. But it’s precisely within that struggle that the joy of books like this can be found, if you’re willing to search. Lain doesn’t want to give you a neat conclusion to take home; he wants you to come up with your own answers, and your own questions, too.

The truth was never out there. It was always in here, man. Keep watching the skies, yeah?