Contact Science Fiction

[superskippy]

Hey everyone, I'm new to the forum but I've been a long time lurker. Here's my first thread topic: Contact Science Fiction. It's always been a favorite genre of mine, the excitement and singular drama of that first contact or engagement between mankind and an alien species. I absolutely love the mix of politics, psychology, and emotion that books on the subject bring. It's what I personally think makes science fiction that has it's backdrop in the present or the near future (within the next century or so) sometimes more appealing than some of the more out there far future science fiction. You don't get the same sense of excitement or the evolution of decision making that comes from that. As crass as it might sound its part of what made Mass Effect as a game so appealing to me, mankind had just stepped onto the galactic scene and was feeling its way through everything. Anyways sort of got on a tangent but I just bought the Hercules Text and look forward to reading it, but I'm curious about what other titles some might recommend.

[noncredible]

Yes, but it only works if the two races are peaceful.

For example, Ive read part of Starquake, and it is awesome.

Ive also seen part of Voyager, where they meet S8472, and its just killing.

[Sinewmire]

Rendezvous With Rama. It's fantastic - mankind in the near future picks up a massive cylindical object headed vaguely towards the sun. A long-range system ship is diverted to investigate.

It's all about the restrictions and explorations of the object, labelled "Rama". There's a real sense of wonder and mystery.

[TOSDOC]

Welcome to the forum! I hope you enjoy these:

The Mote in God's Eye, by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. Great first contact story.

The Swarm by Frank Schatzing. Very far-fetched but entertaining.

[noncredible]

Rendezvous With Rama. It's fantastic - mankind in the near future picks up a massive cylindical object headed vaguely towards the sun. A long-range system ship is diverted to investigate.

It's all about the restrictions and explorations of the object, labelled "Rama". There's a real sense of wonder and mystery.

I havent read it, but my brother has Rama II. Is it also good?

[Freefall]

Rama II isn't even remotely as good as the first. I was actually really disappointed when I read it.

While we're mentioning Clarke, may as well toss in Childhood's End. I like Rama better, because it is a bit less conventional (lots of mystery that is never answered), and it gets all metaphysical at the end, but it's still worth checking out.

[Sarevok]

While we're mentioning Clarke, may as well toss in Childhood's End. I like Rama better, because it is a bit less conventional (lots of mystery that is never answered), and it gets all metaphysical at the end, but it's still worth checking out.

Ugh. That story has all the cliches of bad science fiction like "psi powers" and "ascension". Clarke is a great author but Childhood's End is not exactly a highpoint of the work he produced.

[Freefall]

Derp: I meant that Childhood's End gets all metaphysical at the end, not Rama. Rama could probably be safely labelled as "hard" sci-fi.

Despite the mental powers and stuff, I thought CE was a fun read, at least the first half to 2/3 or so, and it's not like it is a huge book in the first place. Of course, this was over 10 years ago that I read it, so it's entirely possible I was just less discerning at the time.

[Sarevok]

Well I may have been unfair to Childhoods End. Its the sort of story you could enjoy while you are still young and not exposed to a lot of science fiction. But once you grow up watching Trek and Bab 5 ? You cant read a book like that and not go "LOL".

Still its a good pioneering book. It was written in IIRC 1950s. So the fact that later science fiction turned many of the books plot elements into staple of cliches does not mean that the book itself was unoriginal.

[Lord of the Abyss]

I liked Illegal Alien by Robert Sawyer. A first contact scenario that becomes complicated by the apparent murder of a human by one of the aliens.

[Terralthra]

I quite liked Prador Moon, by Neal Asher. It's part of the Polity series.

[superskippy]

Thank's a lot guy's I definitely have a lot of good suggestions to go on. We have a really cool used book store in my town, and there's an entire aisle of old (and some not so old) sci-fi paperbacks. I found Rendezvous with Rama and once I finish with Ben Bova's Colony and Moon series (also picked up at the store) is the next on my list. Though I also picked up Ancient Shores by Jack Mcdevitt it looked like an interesting Alien Archeology/Contact genre kind of book, anyone read it? It's on my backlog, was wondering if I should move it up or shift it back haha.

[StrikaAmaru]

For the sake of completeness, I'll add John Ringo's "Troy Rising" trilogy. I wouldn't go as far as recommending it, the writing struck me as rather crappy, and I'm certain I've read fanfiction of higher quality. The premise is, however, rather interesting, and it might make a good universe in which to play around.

First Contact consists of a Schlock Mercenary-like stargate* arriving in Sol system. There are only three rules pertaining to the Gate: nobody is allowed to block the gate/forbid traffic through it; high-energy discharges are forbidden within a certain distance of the gate; anybody can use the gate, if they pay the fee. And that's pretty much it. From there on, there are 3 first-contact situations: peaceful/trade (they screw us over monetarily, basically giving us colored beads and such), invasion (violent, technologically-uplifted species; they didn't actually invent their ships and weapons; they fight wars like idiots and are swindled out of 'owning' Earth), invasion (somewhat more competent, functional Nazy society; current opponents).

Books 1 and 2 ("Live free or Die" and "Citadel") were released in 2010. Book 3, "Thermopilae", will appear sometime this year. They go for around 5$ on Amazon, but, again, I wouldn't recommend you buy them "for the art". I ended up reading them as a form of brainless entertainment, and they did serve their intended purpose - to temporarily switch off my brain, and to give me something I can laugh at. (But you don't need to buy books for that.)

* Schlock Mercenary was quoted as an inspiration by John Ringo, and the books have several references to the webcomic - fabbers, fettered AIs, the aforementioned wormhole gates, and the main character is an expy of Howard Tayler, the creator of Schlock Mercenary. John Ringo said it might be a prequel, if Howard Tayler agrees; by this point, achieving that would take some massive inter-universe welding.

[EDIT]: the third book is called "The Hot Gates"; my brain translated its name without authorization. Plus, Thermopilae is the name of Earth's second space station.

[noncredible]

I just read Rendezvous with Rama and I am reading Rama II right now.

You can compare them to TOS and DS9.

Rendezvous was a book about a space ship crew exploring a mysterious space station. Nobody dies.

Rama II has 100+ pages of character development and people hating each other before they even get on the ship. Before they even enter Rama, the General dies during surgery, and it is foreshadowed that another person gave him drugs to make it seem like appendicitis and then shut off the robot doctor's fail-safes.

[keen320]

John Scalzi's Agent to the Stars is the funniest first contact I ever read. Don't worry, it's meant to be. Basically, instead of landing in front of the white house or one of the usual cliches, the aliens decide the best person to introduce them to humanity would be a Hollywood agent. Because the aliens have a serious image problem, since they look like amorphous, amoebic blobs. And they have seen the movie The Blob, so they figure they need some help to be welcomed peacefully.

It's definitely not your traditional first contact, but it's one of my favorites.

And I'll also say that Rendezvous with Rama was excellent.

[Aaron]

The entire Rama series is quite good, the ending is a little strange but it seems to maintain its quality throughout.

[Jawawithagun]

John Scalzi's Agent to the Stars is the funniest first contact I ever read. Don't worry, it's meant to be. Basically, instead of landing in front of the white house or one of the usual cliches, the aliens decide the best person to introduce them to humanity would be a Hollywood agent. Because the aliens have a serious image problem, since they look like amorphous, amoebic blobs. And they have seen the movie The Blob, so they figure they need some help to be welcomed peacefully.

It's definitely not your traditional first contact, but it's one of my favorites.

It has got its weaknesses and loose ends dangling everywhere but it is certainly a fun read.

Also, it's available for free reading online.

Another fun one is Greg Costikyan's First Contract. It's mainly about the effects a peaceful contact has on Earth's economy but those aliens too have seen the movies. So they land on the White House lawn for their first contact.

And then whiz off to New York, because by their policies the negotiations have to go through the planetary government.

[Literally Hitler]

If you're after something incredibly depressing and hard sci fi, you're going to want Peter Watt's Blindsight. Its set just before the singularity, scientists are on the cusp of developing uploads, what AIs have been made are so obtuse and autistic that they are savants, and the majority of baseline humans, though happily gene modded, are obsolete and on welfare. Most respond by hooking themselves up to the Metaverse, some respond with terrorism. Out of nowhere, 65536 probes fall out of orbit, forming a perfect lat-long grid across the planet, take a snapshot of us, and beam it off to the Kuiper belt. No words have been said, no shots have been fired (if you ignore all the satellites knocked out). Noone has optimised software for first contact, so off go the best and the brightest.

They send a biologist whose instruments let him feel x-rays and taste scatter plots. They send a soldier who can mentally interface with any number of war drones. They send a linguist whose brain has been surgically carved into 5 fully conscious personalities. They send a sociopathic savant so genetically altered that he is an obligate cannibal (don't worry, he brings his own lunch). And they send a man who can tell the masses back at home what the hell is going on out there. He's got quirks of his own, he's a philosophical zombie who had to develop empathy from first principles.

Don't worry, the aliens obey the light speed limit too, they got here the hard way. What kind of organism pulls itself out of its gravity well and tells itself "when I grow up, I'm going to become a Von Neuman"? They're not eldrich, they're perfectly understandable by humans, it's just that their very existence has implications on the very fate of sentient life.

Oh, and while it got a Hugo nom, it was a commercial failure and got released for free. Check it out.

[adam_grif]

Blindsight is the one where
Spoiler

The aliens want to wipe us out because apparently no other intelligence has sentience, just us? And they think it's a waste/ dangerous?

right?

[Literally Hitler]

That's right. And it's pretty awesome.
Spoiler

That last sentence could have been culled entirely. It was a meaningless phrase. Forcing the recipient of the message to expend energy to translate and parse it is a negative sum game. I expend resources by generating it, and I deplete your resources by forcing you to internalise it. I am clearly a belligerant.

[Sarevok]

How can someone mention Blindsight while forgetting the vampires ? It's Blindsights main claim to fame - their vampires are totally realistic because the author made up a bunch of gibberish technobabble explanations justifying classic vampire behaviors like fearing crosses and drinking blood.

Blindsight is a good case study in how most "hard" science fiction is intellectual masterbation.

[Literally Hitler]

I did mention the vampires. They're a bit goofy, and the little audio/powerpoint presentation he made to promote the book is actually hilarious in the way he pulls apart old figures and pictures and turns them into a fake seminar. And it's hardly technobabble. He did not make up a single word or phrase, he knows what they mean, he's a biologist. He just chooses to skip a ton of the the fundemental reasoning (like absorbing proteins via the gastrointestinal tract), he knows it's bullshit and will never occur.

But that's not the point of the vampires. They're meant to parallel the aliens, something stripped of emotion, incredibly intelligent and completely competent. He has a biologist's philosophy: the purpose of life is to become all life, damn the consequences. And to that, baseline humanity's willingness to expend energy on introspection and faking the reward loops of fitness (art, music, masturbation) make it vulnerable to something that has engineered out these drives.

If anything, it doesn't have idiotic aliens with kooky (earth-based) religions designed to contrast with plucky human resolve. PS. Humans are the chosen ones.

[Stark]

Your understanding of 'technobabble' is pretty broken.

[Literally Hitler]

My view of technobabble is drivel like this and this and this. A biologist using biology jargon to make fictional biological monsters have the most superficial semblance of making sense is a breath of daisies in the reeking pit of science fiction.

[StrikaAmaru]

My view of technobabble is drivel like this and this and this. A biologist using biology jargon to make fictional biological monsters have the most superficial semblance of making sense is a breath of daisies in the reeking pit of science fiction.

Hey, look: I can google before posting:

“An informal term for the use or overuse of technical jargon."

Technobabble (a portmanteau of technology and babble), also called technospeak, is a form of prose using jargon, buzzwords, esoteric language, specialized technical terms, or technical slang that is incomprehensible to the listener.

So your "hilarious" vampires are, indeed, technobabble, as are the hyperdrive and the deflector shields, as is every presentation made by a mareketroid, as is everything you come across and don't quite get because you don't have the proper background.

The notable point is that your vampires, the deflector shields and the hyperdrive also happen to be bullshit, and always intended as bullshit. I see no difference.