What are the best first contact novels

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rezman333

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Curious about everyone's favorite first contact stories. That's a hard one for me, not sure I could name one.
 
Arthur C Clarke was good at these. I give you:
Childhood’s End
The Fountains of Paradise
Rendezvous with Rama.
2001

although Rendezvous is the best- known, I like CE best. His ss The Sentinel is terrific.
 
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Up until a few weeks ago, I would have agreed with suggesting A C Clarke's book Childhood's End. But I recently reread it and I found it be a rather dull book. The story plods along in a predictable way. The characters are lacking a personality and it's impossible to have any interest in their destiny.
A much better book is The Man who fell to earth by Walter Tevis. It's not the best book ever written, but I believe it come a lot closer to what might happen if an alien actually arrived on Earth.
 
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Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama is excellent. The sequels are pretty samey and not so good.

Greg Bear's Forge of God is still one of first contact. I think. It is excellent and remains one of my favourite reads to this day.

What about Carl Sagan's contact?
 
Danny McG said:
Does Day of the triffids count as first contact?
It never fully explained in the book, I thought they were bio engineered and a plane going down released the seeds by accident
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It was a meteor shower that made all the triffids go mad. I don't remember if it was explained why that would happen. John Wyndham was a big admirer of HG Wells. I expect it is a combination of the short story Strange Plant and War of the worlds, but none of that answers the question.
 
Danny McG said:
Does Day of the triffids count as first contact?
It never fully explained in the book, I thought they were bio engineered and a plane going down released the seeds by accident
Click to expand...
Yeah that's what I thought, I think the protagonist believes that the Russians bioengineered it but accidently released it (I think via a plane crash, if I remember) and the triffids spread all over the world. The meteor shower, which was seperate to that made virtually everyone blind, the triffids then took advantage of this. There is some speculation that the 'meteor shower' was in fact some high-tech orbital weapon also. So I'd not have it as first contact.
 
I'm fond of Constellation Games by Leonard Richardson. Aliens come to earth and say hello, governments don't know what to do, but the protagonist decides he wants to play their video games and blog about it.
 
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Rodders said:
Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama is excellent. The sequels are pretty samey and not so good.

Greg Bear's Forge of God is still one of first contact. I think. It is excellent and remains one of my favourite reads to this day.

What about Carl Sagan's contact?
Click to expand...

The sequels to Rama aren’t even in the same dimension of quality as the original, in my opinion. All the mystery and wonder is ruined. And there’s that bizarre relationship...

I remember Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell being highly enjoyable as well as weirdly violent. I’ve not read it since it came out in 1998 though. I’ll have to go back to it.
 
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I saw a post earlier about the author Patrick Tilley having passed away and it reminded me of his book Fade Out which I haven't read for a long time but I remember being an interesting and unusual first contact story.
 
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