I've been enjoying it so far, and Sagan's background as a scientist comes out authoritatively. The his aliens are essentially human, just in slightly different shapes, something that we'd later see in shows like Star Trek: an assumption about alien life developing along the same lines as us, and therefore, are somewhat recognizable.Īfter watching Contact, I've picked up the book, and I've finally been able to get into it. Leinster's story relies on both human and alien crews recognizing some basic constants in the universe, and extrapolates that out to behavior. It's a neat logical puzzle of a story as both crews realize that if one of them turns tail and retreats, the other will be able to track them home – an unacceptable risk that harkens back to those invasion tropes – and they ultimately both come to the conclusion that they should just switch ships, turn off their tracking equipment, and head home.
1), in which a human ship encounters an alien vessel in the Crab Nebula. The story that sticks out to me the most, however, is Murray Leinster's novelette "First Contact"(which you can find in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame Vol. This is an entire subgenre of science fiction literature that stretches from Wells' novel all the way up to films like Independence Day and Battle: Los Angeles, to books like Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers, Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game, and Cixin Liu's Three-Body Problem. Wells' War of the Worlds, of course, which explores the disastrous version: an invasion as aliens come to take our resources. I've been trying to think about the first couple of stories that I've picked up that explicitly deal with first contact scenarios. I didn't quite get the film when I first saw it, probably back in high school or early college, but watching it now, I was really taken aback at just how good of a film it is, and how it digs into the question about contacting and communicating with an extra-solar intelligence. However, while reading the piece, I found that you can stream the film on HBO Max, and ended up putting it on to see how well my memory of the film was, and ended up getting sucked into the film for the rest of the afternoon. I've had a copy of the book for years now, but never managed to get into it. On Monday, I came across a piece in The Atlantic about Carl Sagan's novel Contact, " Why Does Contact Say So Much About God?", which is something of an overview of the novel and its basic message and the role that faith plays in it. Musing about first contact stories Image: Andrew Liptak
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