Favorite (Intelligent) Alien *Short* Stories...

Hi all

I promise to stop begging for recommendations soon- but not this soon.

Im looking for stories that deal with the (im)plausability of alien life and what the implications might be. I suppose a good frame of reference would be Solaris -

but more broadly- what stories concerning either alien life or the search for alien life do you recommend?

Id be especially interested in stories that use this to ask questions about what it means to be human. Thanks.

I recently enjoyed Those Eyes by David Brin. An audio version is available free from EscapePod.org.

The story is told from two points-of-view: a skeptic radio host and a visiting alien.

eta: The text is available on Brin's site: http://www.davidbrin.com/thoseeyes1.html

the collected short fiction of CJ CHerryh is a wonderfull book. Some of the stories are better than other, but all her work asks in one form or another 'what does it mean to be human'.

Galactic north is another collection, though there is much less alien in it - however some of the humans are pushing the bounderies quite a lot.

Pretty much all science fiction asks what it is to be human. Well, except perhaps military sf...

Cherryh, as already mentioned, writes great aliens. Larry Niven’s ‘Known Space’ short stories have great aliens. I think that he was one of the first to feature aliens that were not just Bug Eyed Monsters or humans with pointy ears. Clifford D. Simak's short story ‘Trading Post’ is a good treatment of aliens.

Peter -
do you really think it's necessary to limit your syllabus to short stories? Decades ago in college english it was assumed we'd read a book a week and write a weekly essay. Then, when our son took a history of SF course @ macalester 2 yrs ago, he, too, was expected to read a book/week..Esp. w/ reading that's intrinsically enjoyable in a course that's an elective, why not go w/ novels as well? Not all the books in Adam's course were short - i'm still waiting for our copy of Souls in the Great Machine to come back to NCarolina!

#4, um well yes, as does fiction in general- perhaps I should have been more specific. There are stories that question basic assumptions of what 'life' or 'humanity' is - these are the stories I am interested in.

#6 No there is no good reason to chose short stories over novels except for the reason that the course is cognitive science and not English. Short stories allow for more ideas to be explored - as I'm using it as a vehicle toward framing the cognitive science as well.

I will have a list of 'recommended' novels that I hand out along with the topic areas and try to stress the structural differences between short stories and novels.

p.s. Getting students to read 14 novels (one a week) in a semester is not going to happen.

You mean specifically people looking for it and finding it, as opposed to something like Enemy Mine

Or the last Forever War short story End Game

Both of which are, of course, military sf.

:)

Most science fiction either assumes that alien life isn't human or implausibly has aliens that are Just Like Us with minor variations like pointed ears.

For science fiction on what it means to be human, it might be more worthwhile to look at stories about future developments on Earth. I'm thinking of Heinlein's "Jerry Was a Man," about an enhanced chimpanzee whose status as a being with rights is disputed in court. This plays on racial clichés to make a point, which makes it difficult to enjoy the story today, but it certainly addresses the question you mention.

"Jerry was a Man" sounds like that Robin Williams movie in which he was a robot who wanted desperately to be human. I cried at the end. They both sound like Pinoccio.

On Earth is not alien, by definition, though. Same goes for Susan Calvin Robot stories, etc.

Well yeah, Bicentennial Man was an Asimov story.

Still not aliens, though.

If you want more, say, Greg Egan Riding the Crocodile fits.

The Man Who Lost Red - Terry Dowling

maybe Mother - Philip Jose Farmer

The Chop Line - Stephen Baxter

The Shadow Knows - Terry Bisson

Story Of Your Life - Ted Chiang

Craphound - Cory Doctorow

Oh to Be A Blobel! - Philip K. Dick

Okanoggan Falls - Carolyn Ives Gilman

Think Like A Dinosaur - James Patricky Kelly

Laws Of Survival - Nancy Kress

First Contact - Murray Leinster (there's a Dimension X mp3 version of this if you want some variety )

Shambleau - C. L. Moore

Skin Deep - Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Godspeed - Charles Shefield

Muse Of Fire - Dan Simmons

On K2 With Kanakaredes - Dan Simmons

Custom Fitting - James White

maybe Dinosaurs - Walter Jon Williams

"The Bee's of Knowledge" by Barrington J Bayley, which can be found in The Knights of the Limits

http://scifipedia.scifi.com/index.php/The_Bees_of_Knowledge

And "Mutation Planet" which is available here:

http://www.geocities.com/bayleyfan/mutationplanet.html

I will second "On K2 With Kanakaredes" - Dan Simmons - i just reread it last night. It supposes a basic empathy/similarity among intelligences that have met on earth. And certainly proposes a basic commanality that "explains" why any intelligent being acts in seemingly irrational fashion at times.
Could the Shrike be regarded as an intelligence? (keeping dan simmons in mind)

sigh..youth today...back when we had to slog through the 1/4" of snow???? (umm how about the hordes of mosquitoes) to get to classes at W&M a book/week/non-science course wasn't unusual. And if you had the bad luck to pick poli-sci as a major...3-4 books/week if you got the wrong prof....
But our son's sci-fi course just a couple yrs back, required ~ book/week; doesn't seem that extreme.

I would recommend Crusade by Arthur C. Clarke, as well as several other stories by Clarke that I'll have to look up the titles of.

Crusade hypothesizes about an electronic intelligence evolving within the hydrogen seas of a cold dark planet.

You might be interested in this list that was posted on the science fiction blog io9 today - http://io9.com/5028035/why-arent-aliens-talking-to-us

I'm posting the whole article since, unless you subscribe, you can't get the whole of New Scientist's site. But this is an interesting article by NASA's chief historian on why we may be looking for ET in all the wrong places..or wrong ways.

Steven J Dick,
New Scientist 5/31/2008
WE HAVE been hunting for intelligent life in the universe since Frank Drake inaugurated the first modern radio search in 1960. So far, no interstellar communications have been detected, but I have always agreed with the final sentence in Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison's famous Nature paper of the year before: "The probability of success is difficult to estimate; but if we never search, the chance of success is zero."

I am a fan of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), and I served as the official SETI historian before Congress cancelled NASA's programme in 1993. I disagree with those who say that after almost 50 years we have searched long enough. The truth is, we have searched only the tiniest part of our own galaxy in only a limited frequency range. More to the point: we may have been looking for the wrong thing.

SETI scientists are not known for a lack of imagination, but even they may not be thinking big enough. They consistently acknowledge that alien intelligence would likely be older and more advanced than our own, a belief borne out by what we know about the universe. Yet they have done nothing to incorporate this into their search. Instead, they continue to look for biological creatures similar to us - ignoring the likelihood that any intelligence in the universe has evolved beyond biology.

It is, of course, impossible to know what advanced ETs might be like, but we can make some educated guesses. Cosmic evolution has three components: astronomical, biological and cultural. While SETI scientists readily recognise the first two, by training and inclination they ignore the third. That's a problem, because the one thing we know for sure is that civilisations older than ours will have undergone cultural evolution. And as we know from our experience on Earth, the pace of cultural evolution leaves other forms of evolution for dust.

The study of terrestrial cultural evolution has made great progress in the last few decades, but it has been controversial - think E. O. Wilson's sociobiology, Richard Dawkins's memes, Daniel Dennett's universal Darwinism, and theories of gene-culture co-evolution - and we still don't have a robust theory. There is no doubt, though, that wherever intelligence exists, cultural evolution takes place.

So I propose what I call the "intelligence principle": that the maintenance, improvement and perpetuation of knowledge and intelligence is the central driving force of cultural evolution, and that to the extent that intelligence can be improved, it will be improved. Applied to life in the universe, this means that ETs will have sought the best ways to improve their intelligence, and in doing so may long ago have advanced beyond flesh and blood to artificial intelligence (AI). Futurists such as Hans Moravec and Ray Kurzweil have predicted that a similar transition from biological life to AI will happen here on Earth in only a few generations.

Given these considerations, it seems inevitable that we live in a post-biological universe, and that SETI may not make sense unless we find ways to take cultural evolution seriously. The potential impact on their search is huge. Environmental tolerance and ability to use and create resources beyond the planetary realm means that SETI searches need not be confined to Earth-like planets, or even to planets at all. The intelligence principle renders it unlikely that post-biologicals would wish to communicate with embryonic biologicals such as humans, so we might be reduced to intercepting their communications. The vast disparity in age between biologicals and post-biologicals highlights what has been called the incommensurability problem: the differences between our minds and theirs may be so great that communication is impossible.

Admittedly, there are many objections to the post-biological universe scenario. It assumes that intelligence is the central driving force of cultural evolution. It assumes that strong AI is possible. It assumes that there will be long-term progress in cultural evolution. And it assumes that post-biologicals are themselves not subject to cultural evolution. But the chief weakness of the idea may be that it is not bold enough, perhaps too closely tied to our current world view at the dawn of the computer age.

The argument for a post-biological universe is thus not made with deductive rigour. Neither is the argument that ETs exist at all. But given the existence of ETs, the possibility of a post-biological universe requires serious study. It is an opportunity for AI researchers to place their work in a cosmic context. AI and SETI, after all, have a lot in common, starting with their interest in the nature of intelligence - which is itself an important area of research. Informed by AI and cultural evolution studies, SETI can expand its possibilities in new directions, and in its turn, the study of the long-term future of AI can become more than idle speculation.

Two stories from my youth, but I'll have to rely on others for the titles and authors, but they made big impressions on me. I know that both antedate 1966, but can't go beyond that.

The first involved a Robot sent into deep space centuries earlier who unexpectedly returns, his return had been expected ages ago, but in the intervening centuries he was forgotten. The robot had been programmed that on his return he would ask for his creator and if his creator was dead (and he was, long dead) he would ask for his pay, which of course would bankrupt the world. I don't remember what leverage he had to make such a demand.

The second was about a group of inter-galactic explorers far in the future who hear of a race of immortals and undertake to find them. When they meet, the leader of the immortals reflects to himself that this is the second time humans have been there. Very spooky.

I would recommend both these stories and am sorry I can't give more details.

I can't think of the title of the story, it's one of Fred Saberhagen's Berserker short stories. A shipload of humans on the run from a Berserker ship is out of pilots for the small 'fighter' type ships that are defending the large ships with their human cargo. They install some electronic personalities to pilot the ships. It dealt with creativity and how some people are skilled in unexpected ways.

#20 that first one sounds a bit like the plot of "Star Trek: The Motion Picture"...