The first contact novel is probably the quintessential science fiction sub-genre. I’ve always loved them. MacLeod chooses the modern day space opera as a frame for this, and the humans involved are living on one of the generational ships favoured by those SF writers who don’t want to invent a new version of physics to explain away faster-than-light travel.
The generational ship takes you into the Long Now. Think not about what your life will be like in 20 years time (you’ll notice that the Global Warming crowd are now trying to convince you that life will be irreversibly different in your lifetime – because they think it’s the only thing that will stop you buying that Range Rover), nor even what our society will be like in 100 years time. And forget mortality. Leave all that aside, and imagine a civilisation that goes on (and on) for 14,000 years, where the merest 400-year journey across to the next star on the block will be just one stop for the crew of a giant space bus so large that it contains green fields, an artificial sun line, and cities. This is the kind of civilisation (where immortality is taken for granted, hence the need for onwards expansion into space) that gives you perspective.
The people who live (and breed) in such a vessel have mastered the art of living in space, and of colonising new stars. Stars which end up surrounded by space habitats, forged from asteroids and stray comets, and whose light ends up shifting spectrum – to green – surrounded as they are with transparent habitats filled with plant life.
The people – aliens – who are contacted in this story are described as “giant space bats” by the humans, but MacLeod chooses to make them as human as possible. Of course, they’re so like us that their name for themselves translates as “human,” and their name for their home planet (Ground) is more or less interchangeable with ours.
This is just one of the brilliant strokes MacLeod pulls off in this. We see the story from the aliens’ point of view (we laern about their society, culture, their science and technology), but also from the point of view of a young (ship-born) human girl who writes a blog (a “biolog”) on the ship called, “Learning the World.”
The aliens have their own name and mythology for the stars in the sky which form a green cluster in the night sky. Two of their scientists happen to notice that the number of these stars in ancient drawings is fewer than contemporary observations show. Thus begins their own journey of discovery as (by coincidence) the generational ship arrives in their system. The humans themselves aren’t expecting to find what they do: in 14,000 years, no alien life has been encountered.
The shockwaves that afflict both races are the substance of this enjoyable exploration of society, history, and culture. That the aliens end up surprising the humans (and you can take that both ways) goes without saying, and the ingenuity shown by both sides makes this an entertaining read. Recommended.
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