The best accessible first contact sci-fi novels

I admire how this trilogy, which is wide-ranging and complex, remains accessible while posing original problems and quests for solutions.

Ye Wenjie, an astrophysicist, is recruited into a covert military group searching for extraterrestrial life. Independently, she discovers a new method of sending interstellar messages. One of her messages is responded to by an inhabitant of a dying planet. She ignores the warning not to respond, prompting the aliens to locate Earth and launch an invasion. 

The invasion divides humanity into three factions. One group welcomes the threat of the annihilation of the world’s population. A second proposes assisting the invaders in solving the three-body problem which plagues their planet with ‘Chaotic Eras’. A third group advocates helping the invaders in exchange for saving their lives at the expense of the rest of humanity.

The extended first contact in Solaris is one-way. I like the way that the encounter is described through the extraterrestrial incursion into the minds of the astronauts.

Solaris is unusual in that the life form encountered by the scientists on board an orbiting space station is an ocean. Despite years of attempting communication with the life form, they are unable to progress beyond recording observations of the planet’s swirling surface, which they speculate to be a living entity. 

Shortly before the arrival of a new scientist, Kris Kelvin, they bombard the planet with high-energy X-rays. The planet responds by manipulating the scientists' thoughts, memories, and feelings. Kelvin is confronted by a realistic materialisation of his former partner, reawakening his feelings of guilt over her suicide. The boundaries between dreams and reality break down.

I like Story of Your Life for its unusual aspect and mystery. We do not discover why the aliens visit Earth briefly before leaving again. While their spacecraft hover, mirror-like objects land in various locations, each acting as a means of communicating with their vessels. Their visit profoundly affects the life of linguist Dr. Louise Banks, who is assigned to establish how to communicate with them.

She discovers they have separate spoken and written languages. Unlike terrestrial languages, where each sentence proceeds serially, theirs are delivered in their entirety. Understanding their written language allows her to develop the capability to think similarly, merging the past, present, and future and the ability to foresee her future life. This raises the philosophical problem of free will and the possibility of changing our destiny.

I find The Midwich Cuckoos chilling as it describes how the survival instinct of an alien species overrides any attempt to cohabit with or integrate it. 

The story describes the consequences of the day a spacecraft lands and what happens during that day in which time stands still. Months later, every woman of childbearing age is confirmed as pregnant. The sixty-one resulting children bear no resemblance to their parents. They exhibit common physical characteristics and develop far faster than human children. They use their telepathic abilities to protect each other and control the minds of others. They react to perceived threats by killing and have no apparent empathy with their hosts.

As their aggressive and unpredictable behaviour accelerates, the villagers plot to kill them.

I like this classic as an allegory of colonisation, imperialism, and exploitation, as seen from the viewpoint of the oppressed. War of the Worlds is a commentary on the excesses of empire. Ordinary people are tyrannised by ‘superior beings’; the only response is to flee, hide or covertly resist the superior strength of the invaders.

When all hope appears lost, the solution and relief from the problem occur through an unforeseen accident. Behind the apparent invincibility of an oppressor, a weakness will sometimes emerge, unexpected but beneficial, restoring order to a troubled world.

Many of the problems described in books written decades ago remain relevant today.