From: Alintelbot@aol.com
Date: Mon Aug 02 1999 - 23:04:35 MDT
I liked James Gunn's "The Listeners" quite a bit; I thought Sagan's "Contact"
was essentially lifted from it, with a few bolder ideas thrown in. Neither
novel impressed me that much; the aliens were simply too _human_. Or at
least their motivations were. (Norman Spinrad's "Songs from the Stars" is a
much better treatment of the SETI theme, in my opinion.)
Perhaps the best "first contact" novel I've read is Whitley Strieber's
"Majestic," a fictionalized account of the alleged Roswell crash. You don't
have to have an opinion one way or the other to enjoy this...I read it as a
kind of spooky, well-realized alternate history. But the aliens in it--or,
at least, their insinuated presence--is what makes this one work. They're
genuinely "other," not high-tech versions of ourselves, which is a common
pitfall in mainstream SF.
--Mac Tonnies
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 15:04:38 MST