Five Books About Aliens Who Are Fed Up With Humans

[james_davis_nicoll]

Yelling "Get off my lawn!" on an interplanetary scale...

Five Books About Aliens Who Are Fed Up With Humans

Comments

[james_davis_nicoll]

Tor dot com article 573, 2025 article 42

427 articles to go to article 1000

0

[ffutures]

Still can't comment on the site...

Although we never see an alien reaction, I think that the teleport system in Dave Langford's The Space Eater (1982) probably gets some serious alien responses eventually - the first version has the unfortunate side-effect of making a fairly large percentage of stars go nova regardless of distance. It's possible of course that we're the first species to discover this technology and try it before spotting the problem, otherwise it would have presumably happened at some point in the previous few billion years, but maybe we just didn't recognize the evidence of previous idiots.

[riderius]

There seem to be a lot of "This is a problem for everybody's lawn, wherever you happen to be standing" stories of this sort--probably because it makes alien motivation to do something drastic more understandable.

[petrea_mitchell]

The end of The Fall of Hyperion, when an announcement goes out to all humans that hyperspace travel will be closed to them until humanity better understands what hyperspace is really for.

[(Anonymous)]

Not a problem on this web site: I'm finding Reactor not responding as of Thursday 10th July, 19:50 GMT. "This site can’t be reached. reactormag.com took too long to respond." Says my web browser, Opera.

As in one "Astro City" comic, maybe the aliens didn't like your treatment of the subject?

(Superheroes and villains are real, and a comics publisher gets worse than lawsuits when he libels some of them. So he switches to cosmic and outer space characters, then one day there's suddenly a big hole in town where the office building used to be.)

Robert Carnegie

[james_davis_nicoll]

I sent my editor email but I am sure she knows.

[scott_sanford]

If extraterrestrials replaced Alex Jones with a large smoking crater, would anyone on Earth be all that upset?

[bibliofile]

It's possible that you got caught up in all the traffic trying to get to the new Murderbot story, which went live about then.

[(Anonymous)]

How many genre stories about actual lawns? Or grassland.

W. E. Johns offered a planet where the grass is carnivorous. And bites, I think.

And the novel where an extra special new breed of lawn grass becomes an unsolvable problem.

I can't claim Narnia's "Wood Between the Worlds" as a lawn; it's a wood. But it seems to be grassy - for which a lack of daylight might be a problem, since the trees obscure the sky.

Two and a bit?

Robert Carnegie

[(Anonymous)]

_Grass_ by Sherri Tepper has some lawn in it.