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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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.
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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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