FROM FIRST TO WORST
“First Contact” is, of course, the title of a story that Murray Leinster (the pseudonym of William Fitzgerald Jenkins) published in the May 1945 issue of the field’s flagship magazine, Astounding Science-Fiction. The editor, John W. Campbell, obviously thought highly of the tale, and made it the cover story, with a painting of the two starships from different planets hovering next to each other in interstellar space. (The cover painting was by William Timmins, a now largely forgotten illustrator.)
I don’t know if that was the first time the phrase “first contact” was used in science fiction (first first contact?), but ever since Leinster’s classic story, the phrase is often used when humans and extraterrestrials meet for the first time. There were first contact stories prior to Leinster’s, such as Stanley G. Weinbaum’s celebrated “A Martian Odyssey” and Raymond Z. Gallun’s “Old Faithful” (both in 1934, the latter in Astounding), but Leinster took a fresh look at the situation. Two starships, one from Earth, the other from parts unknown, encounter each other in the depths of interstellar space—and what do they do next? Neither one can leave, because the other might follow the departing starship back home, discover the location of its home planet, and bring back an attacking fleet. It seems that the only possible out, at least for the human’s ship, is to destroy all onboard information that might betray the location of Earth, then either attack the other, or just blow up their own ship and keep the location of the home world secret.
However, neither of those events happen. Leinster gives an ingenious solution to the dilemma which I’m not going to give away here. The result was an instant classic, one of the most repeatedly anthologized stories in SF—editor Ben Bova reprinted it in two different anthologies, for example. When the Science Fiction Writers of America took a poll of their members in the late 1960s to determine the best short stories published prior to the 1964 advent of SFWA’s Nebula Award, “First Contact” tied with Theodore Sturgeon’s “Microcosmic God” for the number four spot, and was included in volume I of The Science Fiction Hall of Fame. Later, after Retro-Hugo Awards were inaugurated, it won a Retro-Hugo in 1996. It has been translated into many other languages, it was adapted for radio on both Dimension X and X Minus 1, and has had the dubious honor of having its famous last line “borrowed” for a comic book story I read in the late 1950s. Star Trek: The Next Generation, and a later Star Trek movie, both used “First Contact” as a title. (Leinster’s estate sued over the movie’s title, but lost.) The story is a milestone in science fiction.
There was even a Cold War aspect. In 1958, Russian paleontologist Ivan Yefremov wrote a story whose title, rendered into English, is “The Heart of the Serpent,” in which, once again, two ships, one from (of course) a Communist Earth, encounter each other—but there is no possible danger, since for a race to be advanced enough to travel between stars, its society must have inevitably been on The Right Side of History, hence Communist, and therefore peaceful. (Sarcasm? Who, me?) The characters mention Leinster’s story, and describe its author as obviously having the evil “heart of a serpent.”
When the Russians attack something for impure ideology, it must be famous. (No word, AFAIK, on what the ChiComs thought of it.) But “First Contact” is not in this book. That’s because that first contact went well for both parties. Suppose it hadn’t?
Murray Leinster was a generally optimistic writer, but not unrealistically so. He wrote other stories of first contact, and in some of them, the ending was far from cheerful. One of them, “The Power,” is included in this book, along with a number of other writers’ stories of worst contacts. Sometimes, the humans get the short end of the stick, and sometimes it’s the ETs. The results may be tragic or humorous, or a mix. But at least one of the sides involved would greatly prefer that their meeting had never taken place.
There were first contact stories before SF magazines even existed, of course. The label fits both H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds and The First Men in the Moon, plus his short story, “The Crystal Egg.” If contact with humans in a parallel universe counts, his Men Like Gods also qualifies. Except for “The Crystal Egg,” none of those human/alien encounters went well—to put it mildly, in The War of the Worlds—and the eponymous “egg” is a sort of two-way interplanetary TV camera/viewer (a Mars-Earth reality show?), which limits how badly things can go. Some writer on Wikipedia considers The Time Machine to be a first contact story. I don’t agree, but if making contact with one’s distant descendants counts, then Wells’ The Croquet Player, going in the other direction, should be added to the list. And maybe his novel Star-Begotten, as well.
Nor was Wells the first. In 1752 Voltaire wrote “Micromegas,” telling of the visit to Earth of two gigantic aliens, one, from Saturn, who stands 6,000 feet tall and is dwarfed by his companion from a planet circling the star Sirius, who is 20 times as tall. Voltaire’s intent is satirical and to make humans appear ridiculous, so it’s an early worst contact.
There has been no shortage of first contact stories since Leinster’s classic, either, and plenty of those turn out badly for one or both parties. I might have included Damon Knight’s classic short story, “To Serve Man” (whose punchline will not be revealed here) if it hadn’t already been so frequently reprinted, and even adapted into an episode of the original Twilight Zone. But readers definitely should go look it up. Novels, too, such as Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle’s novels The Mote in God’s Eye (written, according to Niven, to be “the epitome of first contact novels”) and Footfall. And movies, such as The Thing from Another World, and Independence Day, to name two examples four decades apart. And while this book has (modest cough) a generous selection of very good stories, there were a lot of other good ones I could have used. I regret not being able to include A. E. van Vogt’s “The Monster” (also known as “Resurrection”), and would have liked to include a Gordon R. Dickson story, except that I already included my favorites in The Human Edge, still available as a Baen e-book. I particularly recommend “On Messenger Mountain” in that collection. Add that to the Knight and van Vogt titles previously cited.
Of course some think any race that doesn’t blow itself up and manages to reach the stars will necessarily be peaceful. Carl Sagan argued thus. That’s hardly the only major disagreement I have with the late Dr. Sagan, but for a quick thought experiment, imagine that the Nazis developed the A-bomb first, took over the world, then built starships. Peaceful?
Speaking of Carl Sagan, I was surprised to see that a Canadian blogger reviewed my (yikes!) 48-year-old story, included in these pages, and thought I was reacting to Sagan’s argument. At the time I wrote the story (summer of 1967), I was aware there was a book, Intelligent Life in the Universe, a collaboration between two scientists, a Russian and an American (I. S. Shklovskii and Carl Sagan), which everyone in SF and their cats were raving about, but Sagan’s name hadn’t stuck in my mind (though, oddly, the Russian’s had), and the price of the book put it out of my reach, so Sagan was an unknown to me, along with any of his notions about ETs. The only Sagan I was aware of was named Françoise. In reality, I was thinking of a remark Robert A. Heinlein had made along the lines of “suppose the aliens land and they aren’t peaceful and benevolent,” and considering doing a switch on the peaceful alien visitors scenario, but more subtly than the old alien invaders shtick. John W. Campbell’s alleged insistence for Earthling superiority over aliens, also mentioned by the blogger, may have helped sell the story, but that wasn’t on my mind at all. For one thing, I was skeptical about the reality of that insistence, being aware of several stories in Astounding/Analog which were counter-examples (though later, I learned that one of those stories, Heinlein’s “Goldfish Bowl,” might not be a good counter-example after all).
Sagan thought visitors from space would be peaceful, but a considerably higher-ranking scientist, Stephen Hawking, thinks that contact with aliens would be disastrous for Earth. Of course, in the absence of any actual contact with aliens, it’s all guesswork. In the meantime, a number of possibilities are entertainingly explored in the following pages. Some of the stories involve Martians, though ETs from inside our Solar System in general, or the Red Planet in particular, are now known to be very unlikely, alas. (We didn’t get the Solar System we deserved—whom do I complain to?) My own story was written as a near future tale, and the publisher and I have done some tweaking to keep it still in the future, but my nostalgia for Wells, Burroughs, Brackett, Bradbury and others would be reason enough to leave the Martians alone in those stories by others. Save the Endangered Martians!
And don’t forget, “first contact” should not be used as a verb. Nero Wolfe wouldn’t approve.
—Hank Davis
September, 2015