Preface

IN 1972 SCRIBNERS PUBLISHED A NOVEL of mine called The Listeners. Scribners’ promotion director sent out galleys to a number of authors and scientists, and, among others, Carl Sagan was kind enough to read them and offer a quote: “One of the very best fictional portrayals of contact with extra-terrestrial intelligence ever written.” It was used as an above-the-title blurb on every edition published after Sagan became even better known when he created his popular-astronomy television show Cosmos in 1980.

The following year Sagan signed a contract with Simon & Schuster to write a science-fiction novel called Contact. It was finally published in 1985.

When the film version of Contact finally was released in 1997 (delayed even more than the writing of the novel), my reaction was mixed: I enjoyed the film and yet I felt that it was romantic rather than realistic. The novel Contact had portrayed working scientists realistically and the film perhaps a bit less so, but the plans transmitted were fantastic and the method and purpose of the space journey, not only fantastic but a letdown (a common fault of sf novels). And the question of why aliens would send the plans was never adequately explored.

That isn’t the way it would happen, I told myself, and I was “inspired” to write Gift from the Stars, a response not only to Contact but to every novel of humans encountering the unknown. I wrote it as a series of novelettes, just as I had written The Listeners, and published them over a period of half-a-dozen years in Analog, beginning with “The Giftie,” which won the Analog readers’ poll for best novelette of the year. I have kept that pattern in the book, even though I planned it from the beginning as a novel exploring “the way it would really be.” It is a novel in six parts instead of a dozen or so chapters.

If aliens sent us plans for a spaceship, the novel suggests, they would arrive without fanfare and their arrival would be greeted not with surprise or joy or gratitude, but with suspicion and resistance. A few space enthusiasts would want to implement them to reach the stars, but the great masses of humanity—and the bureaucrats who make decisions for them—would ignore the plans or want to suppress them. Most of all, why would aliens send us spaceship plans? Are their intentions beneficent or inimical? Damon Knight raised the question in a classic short-short story entitled “To Serve Man,” but Gift from the Stars pursues the question in detail and arrives at an answer, like the spaceship the humans construct and name, Ad Astra “Per Aspera.” “To the stars through difficulty.”

Gift from the Stars is a more light-hearted look at the issues of alien contact—the plans, for instance, are discovered as an appendix in a book on a UFO remainder table—and I enjoyed writing them and living with the characters: Adrian Mast, Frances Farmstead, Jessica Buehler, and the troubled genius Peter Cavendish. I liked Frances so much I couldn’t bear to let her die from old age before the novel was over, so I invented a rejuvenation process. I hope you enjoy them as much.

JAMES GUNN
Lawrence, Kansas