The Visitors is a 1980 science fiction novel by American author Clifford D. Simak. It is based on a similar story of the same name, which was published in serial form in Analog magazine.
The Visitors is a 1980 science fiction novel by American author Clifford D. Simak. It is based on a similar story of the same name, which was published in serial form in Analog magazine.
The story outlines contact between Earth and the eponymous Visitors, a group of mysterious objects from deep space. The Visitors are simple black oblong boxes, as large as buildings, which approach from space and orbit the Earth before descending to the United States. The nature of the visitors is kept rather mysterious — it is not clear if they are vehicles or living things in their own right. They are apparently unable to communicate with humans in any meaningful way; on one occasion a human is taken inside a Visitor, only to be released after experiencing a jumble of confusing colored lights and smells which he did not understand.
The Visitors are composed largely of a dense form of cellulose, and they proceed to consume a quantity of trees and plant life in the US. Eventually, they start producing vehicles, superficially resembling human cars but capable of flying using the same unknown principles as the Visitors themselves, and apparently incorporating some element of intelligence, or at least instinct, since they do not crash into things as they move. The humans assume that the Visitors have created these vehicles as a gift in return for the plant matter which the Visitors are consuming, and the novel touches on the disruption such well-meaning gifts might incur on the Earth's economic systems. Toward the end of the book, the Visitors also start producing housing units for humans, and it is even implied that something living may be inside them — perhaps even a Visitor-produced version of humans themselves.
On one level, the novel describes how communication between human and alien intelligences could well be very limited if both parties are genuinely different in psychology and physical form. Humans spend the novel largely puzzled by the Visitors' nature and motivations, and the Visitors seem to lack any real understanding of humans. Neither side ever makes any meaningful communication with the other, and the only real outcome of the contact is considerable frustration and the potential of large-scale damage to Earth's economic systems. The idea of aliens' disrupting human economies also features in the author's earlier novels Ring Around the Sun (1953), They Walked Like Men (1962), and All Flesh Is Grass (1965). The book invites comparisons to the long-term effects on the US society of the Visitors' practices, with the experiences of indigenous populations whose traditional ways of life were incompatible with the practices of European colonists.
Rosemary Herbert in her review for the Library Journal wrote that Simak has "produced one of the most engaging novels of alien invasion ever written". [1]
A Fire Upon the Deep is a 1992 science fiction novel by American writer Vernor Vinge. It is a space opera involving superhuman intelligences, aliens, variable physics, space battles, love, betrayal, genocide, and a communication medium resembling Usenet. A Fire Upon the Deep won the Hugo Award in 1993, sharing it with Doomsday Book by Connie Willis.
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Chariots of the Gods? Unsolved Mysteries of the Past is a book written in 1968 by Erich von Däniken and translated from the original German by Michael Heron. It involves the hypothesis that the technologies and religions of many ancient civilizations were given to them by ancient astronauts who were welcomed as gods.
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The Man in the Maze is a science fiction novel by American writer Robert Silverberg, originally serialized in the magazine Worlds of If in April and May 1968, and published in bookstores the following year. It tells the tale of a man rendered incapable of interacting normally with other human beings by his uncontrollable psychic abilities. The novel is inspired by Sophocles' play Philoctetes, with the roles of Odysseus, Neoptolemus and Philoctetes played by Boardman, Rawlins, and Muller, respectively.
First contact is a common theme in science fiction about the first meeting between humans and extraterrestrial life, or of any sentient species' first encounter with another one, given they are from different planets or natural satellites. It is closely related to the anthropological idea of first contact.
The Space Vampires is a British science fiction horror novel written by author Colin Wilson, and first published in England and the United States by Random House in 1976. Wilson's fifty-first book, it is about the remnants of a race of intergalactic vampires who are brought back from outer space and are inadvertently let loose on Earth.
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War of the Worlds 2: The Next Wave is a 2008 direct-to-DVD science fiction-thriller film by The Asylum, which premiered on Syfy on Tuesday March 18, 2008, directed by and starring C. Thomas Howell. The film was produced and distributed independently by The Asylum.
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The War of the Worlds is a science fiction novel by English author H. G. Wells. It was written between 1895 and 1897, and serialised in Pearson's Magazine in the UK and Cosmopolitan magazine in the US in 1897. The full novel was first published in hardcover in 1898 by William Heinemann. The War of the Worlds is one of the earliest stories to detail a conflict between humankind and an extraterrestrial race. The novel is the first-person narrative of an unnamed protagonist in Surrey and his younger brother who escapes to Tillingham in Essex as London and southern England is invaded by Martians. It is one of the most commented-on works in the science fiction canon.
Clifford Donald Simak was an American science fiction writer. He won three Hugo Awards and one Nebula Award. The Science Fiction Writers of America made him its third SFWA Grand Master, and the Horror Writers Association made him one of three inaugural winners of the Bram Stoker Award for Lifetime Achievement. He is associated with the pastoral science fiction subgenre.
All Flesh is Grass is a science fiction novel by American author Clifford D. Simak, published in 1965. The book follows a small town in Wisconsin that is closed off from the outside world by a mysterious barrier, placed by extraterrestrial beings.
Echopraxia is a hard science fiction novel by Canadian writer Peter Watts. It is a "sidequel" to his 2006 novel, Blindsight, and the two novels make up the Firefall series.
Archaeology, Anthropology, and Interstellar Communication is a 2014 collection of essays edited by Douglas Vakoch and published by NASA. The book is focused on the role that the humanities and social sciences, in particular anthropology and archaeology, play in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). The seventeen essays are gathered into four sections, which respectively explore the history of SETI as a field; archaeological comparisons for human-alien communication, such as the difficulties of translating ancient languages; the inferential gap between humans and aliens, and the consequences this would have for communication and trade; and the potential nature of alien intelligences.
Pastoral science fiction is a subgenre of science fiction which uses bucolic, rural settings, like other forms of pastoral literature. Since it is a subgenre of science fiction, authors may set stories either on Earth or another habitable planet or moon, sometimes including a terraformed planet or moon. Unlike most genres of science fiction, pastoral science fiction works downplay the role of futuristic technologies. The pioneer is author Clifford Simak (1904–1988), a science fiction Grand Master whose output included stories written in the 1950s and 1960s about rural people who have contact with extraterrestrial beings who hide their alien identity.
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