Science Fiction has thrived on First Contact encounters with Aliens. Often in the form of a Direct Contact scenario, whether humans encountering life-out-there during space exploration, or a Visitation to Earth. The Aliens have more often been depicted as a hostile menace, bent on exploitation or eradication, with a physiognomy to match their intent; multi-limbed, razor-toothed horrors.

The advent of SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) framed First Contact scenarios in a different way, and offered authors a different context. After all, if the Aliens are hundreds or thousands of light years away, how could they be a threat?

A For Andromeda

Frank Drake had only just concluded Project Ozma – the first official SETI experiment in 1960 – when British Cosmologist Fred Hoyle offered an alarming interpretation of radio contact with an alien intelligence. A For Andromeda was initially launched as a BBC TV drama in 1961 but a novelisation was quickly commissioned and published early the following year, with the publicity blurb that it would ‘out-Quatermass Quatermass’.

When UK scientists detect a radio signal from another galaxy, they are equally astonished to discover the message contains the blueprint to build an advanced computer. But inside this Pandora’s Box are instructions for creating living cells; an Alien organism…

The Cassiopeia Affair

The Cassiopeia Affair (1967) was co-authored by Harrison Brown, a US nuclear chemist whose work on the Manhattan Project to build the first atomic bomb led to him lecturing on the dangers of nuclear weapons. Such idealism would be challenged by inimical forces in The Cassiopeia Affair, when a possible Extraterrestrial signal is detected. Some, including President Bradley, consider it an ideal opportunity to unify the distrustful world powers of the USA, Russia and China. Others that it is a bogus message from one of those potentially hostile players…

The Listeners

Claimed by some to be the inspiration for Carl Sagan’s Contact, James Gunn’s The Listeners (1972) is a thought-provoking saga covering many decades of listening to the stars in the hope of detecting ETI. And examines the toll upon those scientists who dedicate themselves to a search that might well not achieve its goal within their own lifetime. In that sense, it is a novel as much about faith as science. It also serves as a useful cultural snapshot of SETI’s early years and includes many factual quotes about the subject from that era. 

The Hercules Text

Jack McDevitt’s The Hercules Text (1986 and updated in 2015) depicts a Contact scenario where there is no suggestion of two-way contact – the message appears to emanate from a pulsar in intergalactic space – nor an immediate threat from the Extraterrestrials. Rather, the danger lies in how humanity will handle the potentially epoch-making information. Especially the fumbling bureaucratic machinations (and potential skulduggery) of those made responsible for interpreting the message, and the tensions between scientists and politicians over its implications.

Contact

Carl Sagan was very much an optimist about both the chances of contacting ETI, and their assumed benevolence. His novel Contact has become the mass-media paradigm for a SETI discovery. Like A For Andromeda, this message from the star Vega contains plans to build something, although in this instance it turns out to be a device to cheat the constraints of light-speed travel by using wormholes. Naturally, more hawkish establishment figures are fearful of the consequences. In the movie adaptation, a strident Presidential Advisor (James Woods), notes:

It could just as easily be some kind of Trojan Horse. We build it and out pours the entire Vegan army.

Unlike the movie, the novel sees more than just a US representative enter the machine to hurtle into the presence of its Extraterrestrial creators. One interesting aspect not included in the filmed adaptation is when the Aliens inform their terrestrial guests that they found tantalising evidence of other ETI when calculating the infinite number Pi, only to discover that eventually the numbers resort to a binary code of 0’s and 1’s – a message hidden in mathematics.

His Master’s Voice

Polish-born Stanislaw Lem, who considered an off-world Direct Contact in his enigmatic novel Solaris, presents a classic SETI paradigm in His Master’s Voice. A large facility is secretly established in the Nevada desert where scientists are charged with decoding an apparent neutrino message from ETI. But mathematician Peter Hough is horrified to discover that a by-product of the effort could lead to the construction of a fission bomb, and decides that this information must not fall into the hands of the military at any cost…

Rollback

Canadian SF writer Robert J Sawyer has written two thoughtful SETI-scenario novels, Factoring Humanityand Rollback. The latter, perhaps the most humanistic, sees elderly scientist Dr Sarah Halifax tackling a second alien message, some 38 years after she decoded their first transmission. Now 87, she and her partner, Don, are offered a hugely expensive medical regenerative process known as Rollback. Sadly the process works for him, but not Sarah. And now time is running out to decode the Extraterrestrial message…

SETI Fiction Tropes

Despite being written over a span of more than half a century, there are some common tropes about SETI that emerge. Overwhelmingly, SETI efforts are depicted as US-led (or wholly owned), and, even when not controlled by the military, at least shadowed by them, with the implication that ultimate control might rest with them through the office of the President or other levers of State. Clearly, the Manhattan Project is analogous. 

The efforts to detect and then decode Extraterrestrial messages are invariably led by elite technocrats, Astrophysics and Mathematicians figure prominently, and the Arts are rarely ever represented.

And, the presence of ETI in such scenarios is usually an enigmatic one, to the extent that the dissection of the human condition takes precedence  over the putative aliens – we rarely learn much about them.

A Pandora’s Box motif often underpins the narratives, either the implicit threat that technological acquisitions from ETI will be destructive, or merely the possession of a decoded message may give one terrestrial society (or group within it) a decidedly dangerous advantage over others, whether real or imagined.

Although there are exceptions, most tend towards a more pessimistic outcome of a SETI success. 

And that is surely food for thought.

John Keeling is a content creator and provider for the EAAROcibo SETI UK Facebook page, a social media platform for a proposed SETI effort by the charitable organisation East Anglia Astrophysical Research Organisation (EAARO).