A Maggot by John Fowles

I feel like John Fowles got hold of some bad acid and this book is the consequence. I really liked The French Lieutenant's Woman and am very interested in eighteenth-century history, so I thought this book was exactly what I wanted. While there was a lot of interesting stuff about history, society, etc, there were also, unfortunately, aliens (or time travellers). Why??? Also, I quite resent Fowles's tendency (it was there in the French Lieutenant's Woman as well) to suddenly assume a horribly superior position of all-knowing Modern Man and launch into a long explanation of why his characters act the way they do (even if those explanations are often very interesting and informative). It makes him so condescending, it's very frustrating. Also, I wish he would stop pushing his political views on his readers. In the epilogue, Fowles explains that the book is basically an essay about his belief that modern selfhood, which for the educated, upper and middle classes might have been born from consumerism, learning and 'the Enlightenment' in general, developed in the lower classes through various strands of Protestant Dissent. Interesting idea, but why bring in the aliens?!