It tells the story of Tom Stein, a young Hollywood agent who is hired by an alien race to handle the revelation of their presence to humanity.

Tom Stein is a celebrity agent, representing a handful of Hollywood actors, the most famous of which is Michelle Beck, an earnest but brainless blonde who wants to break into serious acting despite having very limited talent.

Joshua, as it turns out, is a Yherjak, an amorphous ameboid species that communicate through olfactory transmission, and smell horrifically awful, that have traveled to Earth in an asteroid to make first contact.

After meeting Tom's grandmother Sarah Rosenthal, a Holocaust survivor, Michelle absorbs her memories and delivers a blistering audition.

[4] The SF Site compared it to the work of Spider Robinson and Robert Heinlein, calling it "(t)hought-provoking and entertaining", and praising Scalzi for exploring the human tendency to couple morality with esthetics.