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Sunday, October 19, 2014

The Space Opera - Week Nine

This week I read Murray Leinster's First Contact and was pleasantly surprised at how much information Leinster was able to fit in a short amount of time.

Tommy Dort is a photographer on the ship Llanvabon, set out to photograph the turn and evolution of the Crab Nebula (a feat that nobody on Earth would be able to see considering how long it takes light to reach our planet) and is present on board when the Llanvaon encounters another ship, hovering amongst the mist of the Nebula. The two ships sit quietly, neither wanting to turn tail to retreat for fear the other would blast them or stealthily follow them back to their home planet.

Eventually the crew establishes contact with the "aliens" on board the other ship, which is described as jet black and absorbs all light, and they figure out that the aliens don't have ears, and they don't speak from mouths. Instead, they send pulses from a part of their head and communicate in a way that we'd easily recognize as being telepathic.

While the skipper of the Llanvabon and the skipper of the alien ship barter and debate with each other on what the best protocol is, Tommy actually connects and establishes communication with what can only be described as his counterpart on the ship. They "talk" for about two hours and feel a sense of camaraderie while their skippers are conversating about whether or not to kill each other, and Tommy eventually states that the aliens have the "same psychology as we do".

I like that Murray Leinster brings in and explores the idea of duality in this story. There's is a theory that somewhere out there (mostly dealing with parallel universes) there is someone who is just like us, living out their lives as we are (though perhaps a bit differently, maybe they'd made different choices, turned left instead of right for example). The theory typically tends to mean that the other "us' is human as well, but I don't see why that can't apply to "aliens". We already know that there are people living on our won planet who tend to remind us of people we already know. Maybe there's someone you've seen on the street who looks like/talks like/laughs like an ex, your sibling, or a friend. I think this theory and idea could definitely apply to a foreign species, especially one that has the "same psychology as we do".



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