scrape_r_rational/data/cache/5v96mo.md

Any rationalist stories like Carl Sagan's Contact or Arrival?

Post:

I'm sure this has been asked before and I know there are hundreds of stories rational or otherwise relating to Human first contact with another species. So much so that it is hard for me to find one because of the sheer volume, so I'm asking for recommendations.

Really I want something pretty close to Contact because I just loved the overall tone of it. But there are some glaring problems, anyone who saw the film will agree. So I'm looking for something where humans are just setting out into understanding/exploring the universe like Ellie Arroway and her quest for knowledge. Maybe going further than Contact or Arrival does where it sort of ends with so many unknowns still floating about.

Comments:

• u/None:

  If you haven't already read it, [Three Worlds Collide](http://lesswrong.com/lw/y5/the_babyeating_aliens_18/) is a pretty foundational work for this community, written by the same person as HPMOR. It focuses more on some of the concepts Arrival was based on, such as truly "alien" aliens.
  

  • u/kyle2143:

    Thanks! I hadn't heard of that but it sounds really interesting, I really liked HPMOR but I didn't think he might've written something in this vein.
    

    • u/yourewelcome_bot:

      You're welcome.
      

  • u/kyle2143:

    Okay, so I read that story. Was pretty good and very much in that author's style. I don't think it appropriately captured what I was looking for. Which was the wonder and discovery of it all that is in Contact and Arrival(to a lesser extent). 
    
    But I do like how it goes for very "alien" aliens like you said. Where values were just flat out incompatible and the issues were morally dubious at best. Interesting stuff to think about.
    

• u/saltvedt:

  [Blindsight:](https://www.amazon.com/Blindsight-Peter-Watts/dp/0765319640)
  > Blindsight is the Hugo Award–nominated novel by Peter Watts, "a hard science fiction writer through and through and one of the very best alive" (The Globe and Mail).
  > 
  > Two months have past since a myriad of alien objects clenched about the Earth, screaming as they burned. The heavens have been silent since―until a derelict space probe hears whispers from a distant comet. Something talks out there: but not to us. Who should we send to meet the alien, when the alien doesn't want to meet?
  > 
  > Send a linguist with multiple-personality disorder and a biologist so spliced with machinery that he can't feel his own flesh. Send a pacifist warrior and a vampire recalled from the grave by the voodoo of paleogenetics. Send a man with half his mind gone since childhood. Send them to the edge of the solar system, praying you can trust such freaks and monsters with the fate of a world. You fear they may be more alien than the thing they've been sent to find―but you'd give anything for that to be true, if you knew what was waiting for them. . . .
  

• u/Charlie___:

  Have you read The Mote in God's Eye? For all its flaws, it remains a very clever book about a race making first contact.
  

• u/Roxolan:

  I will not risk calling it rationalist, but Stanisław Lem's *[Solaris](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/95558.Solaris)* is one of my favourite stories about *alien* aliens, so much so that true "contact" may be completely impossible.
  
  (I have not seen any of the movie adaptations.)
  

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