give a story idea with the title an encounter with aliens
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I believe that all novels begin with an old lady in the corner opposite. . . . We [must be] determined never, never to desert Mrs Brown. -- Virginia Woolf, "Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown" (1924).
1. "I wonder," says a character in Roger Zelazny's Doorways in the Sand (1976), "what it was really like? That first encounter out there — with the aliens. Hard to believe that several years have passed since it happened." Many people claim that in fact, not merely in fiction, it has already happened. Erich von Däniken's millions of readers like to be told that it has been going on since the dawn of history. NASA puts a pair of life-drawings of the human male and female into an unmanned space-probe so that, should it be intercepted by alien intelligences, they will learn some basic features of human existence. A large pavilion at the "Man and his World" exhibition in Montreal gives to extraterrestrials and the 'evidence' of their encounters with man the same status as the displays of Chinese, Russian, Indian, and French cultures in neighbouring pavilions.
Science and pseudo-science, rational speculation and neurotic cultism may be hard to distinguish at times, but it would be quite wrong to suggest that "alien encounter" fiction makes its strongest appeal to a lunatic fringe. Stories depicting men's "first contact" with imaginary beings touch a whole range of human concerns, from would-be realistic problems of space exploration to the historical guilts left behind by Western man's dealings with other races and cultures (e.g., the Native Americans), and our consciousness of individuality and isolation in personal relationships (can we rule out the possibility of a link between the myths of "first contact" and "love at first sight"?). These considerations, much too wide to go into here, suggest the many layers of response which may be activated by the alien creatures of science fiction.
By an interesting coincidence, the English word "alien," in the special sense appropriated to it by SF writers and readers, shares the same stem as one of the most fashionable twentieth-century metaphysical concepts, that of "alienation." The excitement and fear aroused by the prospect of encountering truly alien beings are not unlike the feelings, associated with "alienated individuals," such as the nihilists, terrorists and "motiveless" murderers first described by Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Conrad. Nihilism involves the repudiation of common, human emotions of mercy, compassion and goodwill towards others. Similarly, it seems likely that extraterrestrial intelligences would look upon Earth, at best, in a coldly rational manner, without reverence for or even any conception of our own inbuilt prejudices in favour of humanity. At worst, like Swift's King of Brobdingnag, the extraterrestrials might very well conclude that men were a race of "little odious vermin" to be ruthlessly stamped out. A third possibility, that of benevolent patronage, has been much explored by SF writers, as has the idea of aliens "inferior" to ourselves who thereby pose us with the moral dilemmas involved in "conservation." What is most unlikely is that we could expect to meet with aliens on unreservedly equal terms, and still less that we could experience feelings of real community with them; "once an alien, always an alien" may well turn out to be the law of the universe.