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I can't speak for the two novels, but I've read the short story First Contact by Murray Leinster referenced near the beginning of the article, and I have to dis

I can't speak for the two novels, but I've read the short story First Contact by Murray Leinster referenced near the beginning of the article, and I have to disagree regarding it being clever. Maybe I'm just nitpicking, but I think it's really contrived and it doesn't hold up. Spoilers below, if you don't want to read a badly aged sci-fi story from 75 years ago. A human and an alien spaceship randomly encounter each other in deep space and can't be sure that the other won't track them back to their homeworld. So, they come up with the "clever" solution of ripping out all their long-range sensors and wiping their navigation logs and then swapping spaceships! That way they both know that the other ship can't track them because they each sabotaged their own sensors. It's really dumb because you can imagine that there must be differences in levels of technology like metallurgy, life support, propulsion, etc, but the story didn't even give those concerns a passing nod. Then, like much sci-fi of that era, it has to end with a punchline as one of the human officers proclaims that he trusts them after all because he spent the past few weeks sharing dirty jokes with his alien counterpart... who evolved on a different world and probably has a radically different biology and sexual practices.

redis_mlc 5y ago
> he spent the past few weeks sharing dirty jokes with his alien counterpart Even on earth, English swearing uses "dirty words", while French use religious words.
justshowpost 5y ago
I can confirm the above. The entire premise of that novelette was all about technological stalemate so to speak (possible inspired by Cold War concepts). While I tend to allow old sci-fi authors some liberties (eg. I never blame pre-nuclear H. G. Wells for claiming what stars are cooling down with time, while just the same claim from relatively modern Jack Vance is unforgivable), the overall storytelling quality is really mediocre. The novelette is might be notable from something like 100 years of Sci-Fi retrospective, but definitely not of something like Gold Collection. I read it just because I generally read a lot sci-fi, that «First Contact» unlikely worth looking for it specifically

redis_mlc 5y ago

> he spent the past few weeks sharing dirty jokes with his alien counterpart Even on earth, English swearing uses "dirty words", while French use religious words.

justshowpost 5y ago

I can confirm the above. The entire premise of that novelette was all about technological stalemate so to speak (possible inspired by Cold War concepts). While I tend to allow old sci-fi authors some liberties (eg. I never blame pre-nuclear H. G. Wells for claiming what stars are cooling down with time, while just the same claim from relatively modern Jack Vance is unforgivable), the overall storytelling quality is really mediocre. The novelette is might be notable from something like 100 years of Sci-Fi retrospective, but definitely not of something like Gold Collection. I read it just because I generally read a lot sci-fi, that «First Contact» unlikely worth looking for it specifically