Most people can safely make general statements about next week, but the trickiest thing in fiction is predicting the future a few decades down the road, where we expect a world we’d recognize, but not quite ours.

Stephen Burns does a pretty good job of it in Call From a Distant Shore (Roc, $6.99). Set a few decades into the future (it’s not spelled out just how many), life looks much like ours, only a bit brighter and a lot faster paced.

On Mars’ moon of Phobos, a telepathic alien named Avva has run into some serious trouble. Young, frightened and alone, Avva desperately makes contact with six humans and pleads for help.

Fortunately for Avva, one of the six is the commander of a United Nations-sponsored manned mission to Mars. Unfortunately, none of the six know one another, and mainly assume they’re going nuts.

But none of them can deny the urgency of the plea, and so plot ensues.

High-speed wireless technology is everywhere in this book; I found myself keeping a mental eye out for communications satellite collisions or net traffic crunch times. Everyone has a few thousand channels, so naturally one of the main characters is the star of a niche weather report, produced remotely in his high-tech basement studio.

And where there’s media over-saturation, there’s media power running amok. A full half of the six contactees are media professionals (if you count the television evangelist). The result is a stronger dose of a drug we’re already on today: the paradoxical separation and alienation of a hyperconnected culture.

The depiction of the Mars mission is vivid and believable, if a touch pessimistic. The spacecraft is prone to breakdowns and minor emergencies, and the six-person crew (three married couples) are running low on patience.

The commander -- one of Avva's contacts -- is far more concerned for the mission than she is for her own wellbeing. Her companions are equally firm in their commitment, but the world at large seems painfully indifferent, if not downright hostile, to what they’re trying to accomplish. Which is, sadly, probably a fair projection of current public interest in space flight.

The strength of such a varied ensemble cast is that the author can use them as lenses, scoping out various corners of his or her world. Burns does this, while keeping the focus tight.

Dan the Virtual Weatherman knows fringe media, and so he provides an especially apt perspective when he is dragged into a painful and very believable media vivisection after an on-air conversation with Avva. Other characters know and see both more and less -- creating a fragmented picture that serves wonderfully to underscore the dislocation and distractions of this zillion-niche-channel world.

The story itself, on the other hand, doesn't go down quite so easily. Why does Avva contact these six people? The astronaut and the brilliant, reclusive hacker, sure -- the former had real power to help and the second had enormous resources at his disposal, despite his psychological limitations.

But the bodyguard of the UN Secretary General? With the brain of the big man himself inches away? Bad luck, I suppose. I would have liked just a few words of explanation as to why these particular men and women and not others.

It's true that the six who hear the call all want to help, but their efforts end up muddled, and too much seems to depend on chance.

The real backbone of the story, though, is the personal one, the struggle of each character to make sense of the telepathic call and its ramifications. This side of the story holds up well even when other aspects threaten to become ridiculous.

The piece has villains, but they’re not what you’d call nuanced. There are a few utterly one-dimensional characters who serve to torment our heroes more than to actually oppose them -- the world’s worst boss, the world’s worst co-worker and an ex-wife so vicious I expected her to start commanding flying monkeys.

But these and other supporting characters frequently give Burns the opportunity for some very funny moments. His writing is occasionally a little overwrought, as if he has too many nice turns of phrase cooking at once and doesn’t want to pace himself, but as a novel Call From a Distant Shore succeeds on the strength of its characters and the depth of emotion they bring to bear.