Talk:First contact (science fiction)

message: This article should really be merged with the aforementioned article.  They share the same meaning, so why should it matter that the "science fiction" article involves extra-terrestrials? Just because interspecies first contact hasn't happened yet (publicly), doesn't classify it as science fiction.
:I'm not so sure. First, anthropologists and science fiction enthusiasts will both come to a "first contact" article with different expectations, and may leave if they are not confident that their expectations will be met. For example, in a combined page which should come first, the anthropological or the science fiction aspects? Second, science fiction occasionally raises issues which have not featured in anthropology, e.g.: how a less advanced race should handle first contact (e.g. Brin's "Uplift" series; Baxter's Xeelee sequence); the problems of communication between races with different hard-wired behaviours (including but not limited to hard-coded linguistics - Steven Pinker's non-fiction book "The Language Instinct" makes a strong case for hard-coding of basic grammar in humans).Philcha 20:13, 26 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Murray Leinster's heirs thought so, and I'll add  mention of the story to the article.Philcha 20:13, 26 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  [[First contact (anthropology)]] 

message: Can't beleive there was no reference to Banks here apart from the "Outside Context Problem" link so added mention of The Culture's Contact section where it seems appropriate. Still far too much bloody Star Trek here though. --JamesTheNumberless 14:31, 2 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Banks 

message: > Mike Resnick (1991). Second Contact. Legend. .  — Resnick explores the theme of humans recovering from a disastrous first contact.
I was curious, so looked up the details of this book.  The several synopses says that a captain is on trial for killing two crewmembers because he thought that they were aliens, and the plea is temporary insanity.  This does not sound like a situation in which first contact has occurred, and there is no explicit mention of actual aliens, unless it's all part of a surprise ending.  If someone has access to this book, please confirm that this is not spam or mistaken identity.  If the link is valid, I'd suggest either embedding a comment or updating the description to  reconcile with the synopses.  --Scott McNay 23:49, 18 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm afraid I don't understand your question.  From the quote above, it would simply appear that the book is about xenophobia after "a disastrous first contact". MrZaiustalk 04:06, 19 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Second Contact 

message: I was looking at this article thinking it might cover the various issues that should be considered in an actual first contact, as a serious discussion; there was a bit in this article, but more as a side issue (and in the contect of SF) than the main subject.  Is there such an article like this?  There's no shortage of material in science fiction on the subject, and I'm sure that there's plenty of serious articles on the subject also. --Scott McNay 23:49, 18 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Good point.  Here's a decent starting point, found from just googling +seti +"first contact" - http://www.setileague.org/askdr/whatnext.htm MrZaiustalk 04:08, 19 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: On second thought, a better place for truly detailed discussion of plans by SETI et al for first contact would be first contact (anthropology).  Anthropology is a science, and is the science that will, if we're ruled by competent technocrats ;), be calling the shots. MrZaiustalk 20:51, 19 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  First contact (science)? 

message: I find the current article a bit of a laundry list, for example "There have been entire series devoted to this theme. One classic series is the 'interstellar trader' series by Andre Norton. A more modern treatment, using radio rather than spaceships, is Contact by Carl Sagan." Would it be better to divide the article by aspects of the "first contact" theme. For example: trust versus caution (Murray Leinster's First Contact; Niven and Pournelle's The Mote in God's Eye); danger of misunderstandings (Earth-Minbari War in Babylon 5; Human-Bugger war in Ender's Game; Human-Tauran war in The Forever War); treatment of less advanced races (Star Trek's Prime Directive; the activities of Contact in Banks' Culture stories); dangers of contact with more advanced races (Brin's Uplift stories, Baxter's Xeelee Sequence);  ultra-hostile aliens (Wells' The War of the Worlds; the Alien movies; the movie Independence Day; Fred Saberhagen's " Berserker" stories) and benevolent aliens (ET; Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis stories); individual attitudes to aliens which are different from that of the rest of a society (ET; several stories in Baxter's Xeelee Sequence); face-to-face contact versus interstellar radio contact (e.g. Sagan's contact; the TV series A for Andromeda); whether the story focuses on the process of first contact (Leinster's First Contact) or on the consequences (Brin's Uplift stories; Babylon 5; most of Baxter's Xeelee Sequence); how some stories and movies reflect contemporary political attitudes (e.g. Cold War paranoia in the 1950s and early 1960s);etc. I realise that many of these stories cover more than one aspect and I'm still trying to think of a way to deal with that.Philcha 21:49, 26 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Restructure by how the first contact theme is handled?

message: The definition says, "... any sentient race's first encounter with another one." I'm not sure about "sentient" here, because much of the literature, including Wikipedia, defines sentience in terms of emotional awareness and sapience in terms of problem-solving ability. Both in psychology and and in science fiction using either term alone makes unjustified assumptions (e.g. in Brin's Uplift stories the Tandu and Jophur are undoubtedly sapient but minimally sentient). I'd prefer to avoid that debate by re-wording to "highly-intelligent". I know "highly-intelligent" is vague and in particular does not imply human-level intelligence, but in some science fiction the issue is how to treat species which have the potential for high technology but have not yet evolved to that point (it's one of the drivers for Brin's Uplift stories).Philcha 22:16, 26 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: This issue right here is why I think Blindsight (Watts novel) from 2006 should be mentioned in the list - it explores the problem in some depth (and is generally regarded as a milestone First Contact novel anyways). Frabartolo Ringril (talk) 17:06, 6 November 2020 (UTC)
thread_title: Sentient / sapient / highly-intelligent

message: The intro to First contact (science fiction) says "... by adapting the anthropological topic of first contact to extraterrestrial cultures," which to me implies that that there was already a significant body of knowledge in anthropology before first contact featured in science fiction. But: First contact (anthropology) is little more than a stub and has few outgoing links (one of which is First contact (science fiction)); I've googled for "first contact anthropology" aand got nothing significant (mainly copies of First contact (anthropology)); looking through Wikipedia suggests that anthropology only got going in the last quarter of the 19th century (e.g. James Frazer's work in the 1870s), while H G Wells wrote some "first contact" stories in the mid-1890s. This suggests to me that anthropology did not have clear priority in the topic of first contact. So I suggest it would be better to list first the areas of overlap between science fiction and anthropology (mainly socio-cultural and linguistic) and then those which appear only in science fiction (some magnify the topics in the overlap because the situation involves different species; other are unique to sf, e.g. how to treat species which have not yet evolved to human-level intelligence, how to build trust without exposing one's species to a first strike, etc.)Philcha 11:54, 27 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Actually, I would not be surprised if, as is also the case in SF (i.e. earliest stories that include the theme do not include the now common phrase), in anthropology the concept existed but did not go by the name of "first contact" before a certain point. Certainly there were "first contacts" with natives of the many, many places Europeans explored and settled (or attempted to settle, or conquer as the case may be), even though they probably did not initially refer to it as "first contact" (especially without pronouns, heh), and it may not have been considered part of anthropology so much as a part of more general exploration or something. In any case though, just because it's not easy to find on the internet through Google does not mean it does not exist. The WWW has only been around for about 12 years, you know. :P If you're truly curious on the subject, why not contact members of anthropology departments in universities? That might actually be easier. 4.235.6.139 19:19, 20 August 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Did anthropology get there first?

message: While Sethie enjoyed the writing in this section, the whole section seems like one editors thoughts about first contact scenarios, as opposed to citing sources or reporting what WP:RS sources have to say.Sethie 07:12, 11 May 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Removed section

message: I remember reading this article months ago and thought it was a decent article. As I am currently reading the novel Anathem by Neal Stephenson I came to remember this article and see if it had mentions of similar ideas. This entire article is about first contacts with beings from other planets, but what about first contacts with beings from other universes (alternate cosmos). I came to look here and there's nothing of the sort, but where would something like this be? I see this as a similar story idea just slightly different. Should this idea be investigated further as another paragraph could be added to simply state that the idea of first contacts aren't limited to alien races. ... There already is a fairly useless paragraph in this article that seems to serve no purpose other than to advertise novels by Asimov and Bujold. 99.240.191.134 (talk) 03:20, 18 January 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Other Types Of First Contact 

message: Neither the author nor the story is listed in the Internet Speculative Fiction Database, and this summary adds nothing to the article that I can see, so I deleted it.  Naturally it was quickly restored, by the one who added it (and who also added it to Alien invasion).
How about publication data for the story, at least? —Tamfang (talk) 08:05, 11 May 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Best" 

message: Despite this concern voiced here many years ago, the article continues to grow as laundry list cum original research. Therefore I am about to turn "Examples" into "List of First Contact stories", stripping it from any unreferenced comment . Staszek Lem (talk) 19:42, 31 May 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  Unreferenced laundry list 

message: Well, it seems that the split proposal failed. @Mike Christie suggested moving the contents (that have articles) to :Category:First contact science fiction. This is absolutely a good idea and needs to be done, but that doesn't change the fact that the list on the page still needs to be dealt with. Since splitting is off the table, it can either be improved, or removed. I'm personally ambivalent, but I'd rather have some thoughts on it before going ahead with improving it. Ships & Space(Edits) 16:34, 8 May 2024 (UTC)
replies: text: How about moving it all to a collapsed section on this talk page, where it can be a reference as the prose part of the article is improved?  Anything that's already mentioned in the prose part of the article doesn't need to be in the list as well; anything not mentioned in the prose probably isn't referenced by secondary sources and so shouldn't be in the article anyway.  And of course if anything is removed that is later found to be discussed in the sources it's easy to add it back. Mike Christie (talk - contribs -  library) 16:47, 8 May 2024 (UTC)
replies: text: That works. Although, with the exception of The Three-Body Problem, Story of Your Life/Arrival, and maybe the Culture series and "First Contact," the new list is almost done (though I'd also like to remove the Close Encounters excerpt), so I'm not sure it's necessarily worth it. Ships & Space(Edits) 17:00, 8 May 2024 (UTC)

text: Having spotted this and the above discussion on the closure requests page, I would second TompaDompa's attitude early upthread. If there's not significant secondary sourcing for first contacts in specific fiction and it's discussed in the context of chronological depictions, I see very little reason to spin off what can be prose into a list format. And yeah, the only way you can maintain lists like these is if you directly cite each individual entry. Otherwise they rapidly decay and cannot be easily verified. Mike Christie's suggestion to migrate it to talk as a skeleton to improve the prose coverage seems a good one. Der Wohltemperierte Fuchs talk 17:25, 8 May 2024 (UTC)

text: Once the above split discussion is closed, I'll move the list over here (probably into this thread), assuming the closing editor doesn't. I'll also remove the items already included in the prose list section. I might move the current Solaris content to the "Stanisław Lem" subsection. Ships & Space(Edits) 20:45, 10 May 2024 (UTC)
replies: text:  Closed, following WP:SPLITCLOSE. Go ahead. - Altenmann >talk 06:00, 12 May 2024 (UTC)

text: I've kept the references, as they may be helpful. Note that I've removed multiple works that are either already treated in the article or are mentioned multiple times in the list itself. I removed a quote from one of the references, as it was quite long and is almost certainly not going to be useful. I've kept most of the prose in the list, mostly because it just doesn't seem worthwhile, but also because it might be helpful in writing the prose section versions (assuming that the work belongs, that is). Ships & Space(Edits) 15:48, 12 May 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  What to do with the [[First contact (science fiction)#Chronological list|list]]? 

message: * 1901: The First Men in the Moon H. G. Wells
* 1940s: In Fredric Brown's Puppet Show, an obvious and self-proclaimed alien negotiating with humans is actually something else entirely.
* 1945: "First Contact" by Murray Leinster
* 1950s: A classic series of stories using this theme is the "interstellar trader" series by Andre Norton.
* 1960s: A for Andromeda
* 1960s: The god-like Firstborn from Arthur C. Clarke's Time Odyssey series.
* 1961: Solaris (novel) (Ref is  Quote is from §6:72)
** A major theme of a number of works of Stanisław Lem, the most well known being Solaris (while his most thorough examination can be found in His Master's Voice), is the inherent impossibility of meaningful communication with alien races. (Ref is Wojciech Orliński, Co to są sepulki? Wszystko o Lemie [What are Sepulki? Everything about Lem], 2007, , p. 54.)
* 1968: His Master's Voice (novel)
* 1969: All Judgment Fled by James White features the political and psychological stresses imposed by first contact when a six-man team of astronauts is sent to investigate an alien ship that has taken up an orbit near Mars. It has been cited by the science fiction author and editor Mike Resnick as a particularly notable contribution to the type. (Ref is )
* 1974: Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's The Mote in God's Eye was written to be, in Niven's words, "the epitome of first contact novels". Here it is humanity that plays the role of visiting aliens, as the religious, technological, political, psychological, military, cultural, and biological implications of first contact are explored.
* 1978: Life on Another Planet
* 1979: Alien
* More modern treatments, using radio rather than spaceships, include The Hercules Text by Jack McDevitt, Life on Another Planet by Will Eisner.
* 1980s:  By contrast, in the works of Iain M. Banks, the Contact division of the galactic civilization calling itself the Culture (which features in the majority of Banks' science fiction) frequently manipulates less advanced civilizations, steering them towards peaceful progress, especially those that may become aggressive or dangerous, under the pretext of maintaining the balance of galactic power; a notable exception being the short story The State of the Art, in which the Culture decides not to contact Earth so they can use it as a control against which they can measure their manipulations of other societies. Novels such as The Player of Games and Look to Windward delve into the psychology of first inter-species contact in considerable depth. In the novel Excession, Banks coins the phrase Outside Context Problem in relation to first contact.
* 1980s: Gary Larson occasionally used a humorous version of the theme in his The Far Side comics, such as showing an alien falling down the steps of a flying saucer, thereby ruining a dramatic entrance.
* 1980: The Orion Loop, Soviet film co-written by cosmonaut Alexei Leonov
* 1982: E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial
* 1982: Nor Crystal Tears
* 1983: V (1983 miniseries)
* 1985: Schismatrix
* 1986: The Hercules Text by Jack McDevitt.
* 1987: The Forge of God
* 1990s: Examples of the mutual inscrutability and the potentially unbridgeable gaps between races which—by their very natures—are just too different to bond or even to accept each other, include Stephen Baxter's Xeelee Sequence concept of the dark matter photino birds, the god-like Firstborn from Arthur C. Clarke's Time Odyssey series. In other cases, such as Greg Bear's The Forge of God and Anvil of Stars, or Bruce Sterling's Schismatrix, aliens are presented as falling into a highly diverse spectrum, some easily relating with humans, others too alien for meaningful communication.
* 1993: Anvil of Stars
* 1998: Story of Your Life by Ted Chiang, made into a film Arrival released in 2016
* 2006: Blindsight by Peter Watts
* 2007: Halo: Contact Harvest
** In the novel Halo: Contact Harvest, humanity's first contact with aliens is on a human agricultural colony, where an initially peaceful meeting (although preceded by aliens walking into an anti-insurgent trap set up human military) with an alien alliance known as the Covenant turns violent, eventually resulting in a 27-year war.
* 2007: Mass Effect
** The backstory of Mass Effect features the First Contact War, caused by an alien military patrol observing a human ship, which was unknowingly breaching galaxy-wide conventions, attacking it and occupying a seemingly poorly defended colony, only to learn of humanity's military prowess in a swift counterattack. The conflict was quickly smothered by the galactic community, but the reputation and bitterness persist until the events of the games.
* 2008: The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin, a Chinese science fiction novel (first serialised 2006)
* 2016: Arrival, film adaptation of the 1998 novelette Story of Your Life by Ted Chiang
* 2020: Axiom's End by Lindsay Ellis
* 2021: Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir
:I've kept the references, as they may be helpful. Note that I've removed multiple works that are either already treated in the article or are mentioned multiple times in the list itself. I removed a quote from one of the references, as it was quite long and is almost certainly not going to be useful. I've kept most of the prose in the list, mostly because it just doesn't seem worthwhile, but also because it might be helpful in writing the prose section versions (assuming that the work belongs, that is). Ships & Space(Edits) 15:48, 12 May 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  List 

message: A number of languages definitely are among the top, thanks to the cinema and to the efforts puut in creating them. I guess these would be
*Klingon, I's say #1. Heck, I am old enough to remember tere was even a Wikipedia in Klingon language, mercilessly killed by the SuperWikiPowers (I worgot which bureaucrats control creation of new wikis) But I am noto sure whether it is the language of the first contact (I even dont know whether there was any "first contact" of humans and klingon made in film
*Na'vi of Avatar (Surely it is #1 for younger generations
*Languages in Star Wars (Being not a fan, I am not sure whether there were any firsts contacts in this universe
*Unnamed language of Arrival (my preference though is the take from the Story of Your Life) Fancy it may look like in the movies, it misses a crucial feature of any language: redundancy, which is a must for noise-tolerance in any "natural" communications medium. Whatever. I didnt like the film anyway.
- Altenmann >talk 06:08, 13 May 2024 (UTC)
replies: text: Is it really necessary to include specific languages? I don't really see how they would fit into this article. Maybe if there are some creole languages. Ships & Space(Edits) 01:10, 14 May 2024 (UTC)
replies: text: How do the sources treat this aspect? TompaDompa (talk) 18:49, 16 May 2024 (UTC)
replies: text: Exactly. WE have to use sources that treat this aspect as a generic aspect, not about individual languages. Also, since we have "main" article, here we have to follow Wikipedia:Summary style. - Altenmann >talk 19:26, 16 May 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  Languages