The Best Five Novels of First Contact

For people who are sick of Star Wars and do not like ET

Since writing Part 3 of my SF and violence series is taking longer than expected (as I am deep into the final edits for my new novel A Tale of Three Cities as well), I want to offer something for my subscribers in the meantime. People have expressed interest in having recommendations of SF novels on a particular topic. So, here is one topic everybody loves: alien encounters.

The most interesting part of alien-contact stories is always the beginning when the aliens are mysterious, barely glimpsed, unknown, and possibly unknowable. But in too many cases, it is followed by the revelation that the aliens are actually very much like us. Not physically - you can practically see the author racking their brain for memories of high-school biology to come up with tentacles or stingers. But intellectually and emotionally, aliens are too often human beings in disguise. I have lost count of the number of SF novels, in which intelligent bugs or scorpions talk, think, and emote like the average Joe. Not only am I bored by anthropomorphic aliens, I find them intellectually insulting. We often misunderstand people of different cultural backgrounds. We cannot communicate with quasi-intelligent species on our own planet, such as dolphins. And you are telling me that the product of a totally different evolution and history will behave like your next-door neighbor? In fact, my solution to the Fermi Paradox is that aliens are so, well, alien, that we would not even recognize them as intelligent.

But of course, an SF author cannot just write “mysterium tremendum” and be done. In novels, we want some interaction between humans and aliens, whether positive (boring), negative ( interesting), or violent (best). Here are five of my favorites. In fact, as I started writing the list, I realized that five is a ridiculously small number. So, this is just the beginning, and more is coming.

H.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds (1897). People who have only seen the movies have a wrong idea about this first alien invasion in SF. They think that the Martians come to steal our resources or just to exterminate us because they are baddies. Neither is true. Wells’ masterpiece is somber, dark, beautifully written, and most of all, mysterious. We do not actually know anything about the Martians because they never communicate with humans. The first-person narrator conjectures all kinds of things about them but they are just conjectures. The idea about stealing resources is one of his attempts to explain what is going on, and since he is unreliable, we cannot take anything he says at face value. The narrator (we do not know his name) also claims that the Martians are the evolutionary descendants of humanoids like us, which underscores the visceral horror of their appearance, and the fact that they seem to feed by drinking blood. The novel is prophetic in its depiction of gas attacks, abandoned cities, and masses of refugees - everything that would become reality in World War 1.

Stanislaw Lem, Solaris (1961). Possibly the best SF novel ever written, it had the misfortune to be adapted into two of the most boring and pretentious movies ever made. Yes, I am talking to you, Andrei Tarkovsky and Steven Soderbergh. The novel is stunning, not just because of its detailed and vivid descriptions of the living Ocean, but also because the alien simulacrum Harey produces just the right balance between shivery uncanniness (as when she comes back from the dead after drinking liquid oxygen) and empathetic identification (as when she struggles with the question of free will and making choices). What Tarkovsky and Soderbergh did not realize was that the novel is not about “love in space”, as Lem himself derisively called these movies. It is about something profoundly mysterious and unknowable that is, nevertheless, close enough to touch. Kris Kelvin’s most enduring relationship is not with his dead girlfriend but with the alien Ocean itself.

The Strugatsky Brothers, Roadside Picnic (1972). The aliens have come and gone, leaving behind the mysterious Zone filled with dangerous and powerful objects whose underlying technology is incomprehensible. The novel has spawned a whole host of “Zone” novels, in which impossible or alien spaces are located within a familiar landscape (Jeff Vandermeer’s Southern Reach trilogy is an example). There is also the virtual community the SCP foundation which is generating an entire ongoing industry of “anomalies”. But Roadside Picnic is the first and still the best, primarily because of its unsettling ending, commented upon by Fredric Jameson, in which the alien Golden Ball becomes an elusive promise of either utopia or annihilation.

Michael Bishop, Transfigurations (1979). This novel deserves to be much better known. The aliens in it are more humanlike than the Ocean of Solaris or the tentacled Martians. But precisely because of that, their horrifying (from our point of view) behavior, which includes familial cannibalism and willful regression into savagery, is so shocking. The novel is a perfect anthropological mystery, in which first the well-meaning scientist Chaney and then his daughter, penetrate deep into the alien jungle, trying to understand this twisted culture. An explanation of sorts is offered at the end, but we never know whether it is, in fact, true, or what can be done to save the Asadi from their degradation. I find the novel intellectually challenging and emotionally disturbing: in other words, precisely what a perfect SF novel should be.

Peter Watts, Blindsight (2005). When Watts first offered this novel to publishers, it was rejected as “incomprehensible”. When I taught it in my SF seminar, some students complained of the same. But it is not. In fact, once you learn the quirks of its posthuman narrator, the novel becomes not only perfectly understandable but as absorbing as any thriller. If there is a spectrum of human to alien intelligence, its aliens are beyond it because…well, because they may not be really intelligent, even though they behave as if they were. Does it sound familiar? Does it sound, perhaps, like your Gemini, your ChatGPT, or whatever? If so, and if you are unsettled by the question of whether AIs are something more than LLMs, you may want to read Blindsight.