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Joined: 4/26/2011
Posts: 77
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I love First Contact fiction, where men meet the Other for the first time. My favorite such writing is (spoiler alert!) in the fiction of Rosemary Kirstein. The aliens are truly alien, and the contact is intellectually plausible. The aliens have a wonderfully weird symbology, one which is an indirect inspiration for the load pellets in my story Small Bore.
What are my criteria for a good First Contact story? It must be original, plausible yet mysterious, and intellectually challenging as well, but most of all, the Other must be truly Alien:
-- no men in rubber suits!
-- no talking balls of light!
-- no English speakers among the aliens!
(Having written that, I realize that the struggle to communicate is part of the charm of a First Contact scenario, for me.)
and I am sure I could think of more. What are your own criteria?
Have you ever written a First Contact story? (I haven't.)
What First Contact depiction (written or visual) is your favorite, and why?
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Joined: 4/26/2011
Posts: 77
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Speaking of the Struggle to Communicate, I fondly remember the Star Trek: Next Generation episode in which Picard struggles to communicate with a man-in-rubber-suit alien who speaks English, but of a particularly opaque sort.
I don't remember any dialog, but the alien would say something like "Twirlip of the Mists, at sunrise!" as though it meant something.
I liked the episode because of the focus on the effort toward mutual understanding, but ultimately it fell flat because I just couldn't believe a real alien would ever talk like that.
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Joined: 3/13/2011
Posts: 412
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Philip, thats the episode Darmak and Jalad, at Tanagra. agreed, there has to be something unique to the culture to get them to have a language of references. (on second thought... I know a lot of people today who speak in nothing but shared internet meme's and pop culture refferences... for example, If I say, its like rain on your wedding day, you know I'm calling somethign ironic. )
My favorite first contact scene is the understated picture of first contact and brief flash from Men in Black, because there is SO much story from 5 seconds of footage.
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Joined: 4/26/2011
Posts: 77
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I loved Men in Black! It's one of a very few works which get an A+ for Aliens from me. I can forgive their un-alien behavior because it works in a comedy.
I wish someone could put that much ingenuity and creativity into aliens in a really good SF movie that also features human drama, not to mention acting and plot. I'd also like a pony and a lollypop. The only thing I can think of which comes close to what I long for is Serenity, but it doesn't have any aliens at all, only those berserker things. Other ideas?
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Joined: 3/12/2011
Posts: 376
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I haven't read much 'first contact' fiction. I've written a bit of, for lack of a better term, 'second contact' fiction, but it touches on a lot of the same ground you're talking about here.
Finding a way to communicate. Communicating effectively when the underlying assumptions are different. Avoiding the piftall of false familiarity while not becoming frustrated with the lack of communication.
With that in mind, I think Cherryh's Foreigner series dealt with those things very effectively. In that case, she focused not on language, which actually is one of the easier things in cross-species communication, but on underlying biology-based assumptions.
As an aside, I don't think language would actually be *easy*, I just think it's one of the easier things we woudl have to deal with, considering our species' history with fragmented language and cryptography. And yeah, I cheated in XLI because the language issue was dealt with prior to the start of the book.
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Joined: 2/27/2011
Posts: 353
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Rober -
I was just going to recommend the Foreigner series! LOL!
I also think that Karen Traviss's Wess'har series - beginning with City of Pearl - is amazing and does a great job illustrating what happens when the communication just goes horribly wrong.
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Joined: 2/27/2011
Posts: 353
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Whoops, I meant Robert! Lost my "T" somewhere in there...
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Joined: 3/12/2011
Posts: 376
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S'Okay! See, we do think alike on occasion! *grinz*
I hadn't even heard of the Wess'har series, which considering my townhouse looks like a set for a live action version of Read Or Die, just serves to illustrate the volume of books available.
Anywho, thanks for the recommendation!
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First contact? Hell, I’ve written it. Several of them as a matter of fact. But I’ve broken your rule of aliens speaking English, I’m afraid, because in Foreign Embassy they show up in a fifty story flying office building—their embassy—and set up shop on the Mall, next to the Washington Monument.
I don’t know if its your cup of tea, but since I believe in shameless self-promotion, you can read an excerpt here: http://www.amazon.com/Foreign-Embassy-ebook/dp/B0050EBNUM/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2&s=digital-text&qid=1305505367&sr=1-3
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Joined: 4/26/2011
Posts: 77
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"Whatever it is, it ain't local!"
I just watched Contact (1997) with Jodie Foster in a quasar-bright role as astronomer Ellie Arroway, obsessed with SETI. And she finds it.
Damn I love smart women! And this movie and Foster are highly intelligent. The plot has everything from a reclusive billionaire to a charismatic religious figure.
I warn you that the rational-non-rational conflict is pretty soppy at times.
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Joined: 8/10/2011
Posts: 6
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My favorite first contact story is probably Nor Crystal Tears by Alan Dean Foster. It's actually written from the POV of a character of the "Other" (the insectoid Thranx), and is about the Thranx's first contact with Humans. The Thranx also happen to be among my favorite aliens in all science fiction.
I have sort of written a first contact novel. Humans land on a planet that happens to be home to a race of dragons. I sort of get around the communication barrier by making the Humans able to understand the dragons' telepathy, but the Humans have to be in the right state of mind. If their minds are filled with anger or suspicion, they cannot hear the dragons.
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Joined: 2/27/2011
Posts: 353
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Another great first contact is The Mote in God';s Eye by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle.
A great first contact flick is Enemy Mine. So good!
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Joined: 5/12/2011
Posts: 240
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My current Sci-Fi work in progress is about first contact and I have English-speaking aliens. I don't understand why there should be a blanket rule against that, since in the case of my aliens, they are way smarter than us and have been parked just outside our galaxy watching us for generations. Of course they've learned our language. It would be weirder if they hadn't.
I don't know about the rubber suits, though! I have yet to write the bit where a human sees one of the aliens (or even decided whether she will see them at all, though she will be aboard their ship) and I haven't decided yet what they will look like.
I don't have any first contact preferences in fiction. I enjoy watching all different approaches. I think because I basically don't believe it will ever, ever happen in any imaginable human future, I am at ease with whatever anyone might imagine it to be.
I guess I sort of don't like the ones in which the aliens look like little green men with big eyes and heads a la alien abduction theories. I just don't buy any of that, so it annoys me to see it played out. I also prefer something a bit more subtle than mere alien-attack.
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Joined: 3/13/2011
Posts: 222
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One of my favorite scenes is from Crystal Line, book three of the Crystal Singer series by Anne McCaffrey. I really liked crystal could be portrayed as sentient and capable of eating things like metals.
Also by McCaffrey (with co-writer Elizabeth Scarborough) the Powers that Be -- but this time the entire planet is sentient. I really liked the presentation of these other lifeforms.... and how the lifeforms could be presented as something more than one entity.
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Joined: 5/12/2011
Posts: 240
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Crystal makes me think of the super-intelligent shade of blue in Douglass Adams' work. My favorite alien life form ever!
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Joined: 4/26/2011
Posts: 77
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I note that Roger Ebert reviews Contact, the 1997 movie, in his column today.
http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2011/12/a_journey_to_the_center_of_the.html
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Joined: 8/21/2011
Posts: 394
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With respect to novels, my favorite contact scene is the very first chapter of the first book of Cherryh's Foreigner series. Hands' down.
But, and please don't shoot me, I will always have a special fondness for the first contact scene in the movie ET. No English-speaking alien there; no rubber suits. Just the wonder and curiosity of childhood, the lure of Reese's pieces, and one abandoned alien.
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Joined: 3/13/2011
Posts: 412
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Also, Robert Aspirin's Phule's Company, in which, well, everything goes to hell as aliens that are very different from us, but very alike (in that people screw up and murphy's law is truly universal) struggle to understand.
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