All Comments on 'First Contact – Naked Alien Arrival'

Except for the erotic parts, this would easily have been published in _Analog_ under John Ghod Campbell, or _Worlds of IF_, under Fred Pohl.

Ten stars, at least

Thanks for the wonderful 3/10/2023 comment "Anonymous". :) I remember Analog though I haven't seen it in decades. Someone in the house had it when I was a kid and I'd sneak off with the thing and read stories. I always want my work to go beyond just turning a reader 'on'. Glad to hear you liked it.

This is great. What a setup, too, for future development! I'm reminded a little of Blue Mars, when people began to colonize all parts of the solar system and specialize for the extreme environments... And a little of Seveneves with the different branches of humanity coming together... The skin warming and glowing for cold conditions especially has fun potential! And you brought a quick tear to my eye with Yoana's small part, enthusiastically welcoming as it was. I like how you've given a sense of how cultures all over the world will be transformed by ubiquitous nudity and hyper sex drives and new technologies and even those religious revelations... Teacher playing a trick there maybe? I don't know about her...

I am having a little fun with Teacher's motives. It's a great way to both throw in story problems and solutions with the same character. Teacher has a mission that is based on the 'best guesses' of well meaning people that died 1-2 million years in the past on a planet far away that no longer exists. All she is is a very complex program. She's not truly sentient - her algorithm is just an extremely complex "if this, do that". In some of the other stories (and the one I'm working on), we'll get to see her "this is what's best for you" perspective come out a bit more.

I was worried when I wrote this chapter that it was too much setup, so I'm very glad people have liked it so far. To give myself the foundation for other parts, I needed all of that setup somewhere in notes, and you can't really tell an "Aliens Among Us" story without telling how they got here (well, you can, but it would drive me crazy).

Yoana's part...

Everything from the line:

"Ok Teacher, what's really going on?"

and the going on from there until the epilogue was written a year after the parts before it. With the epilogue having been written at the same time as the larger story. Yoana was not originally in this story at all, but she's such a major part of Ángelita's life after that I wanted to bring her in at this point.

I wrote that section to explain some aspects in the story that were purposefully "illogical" according to the normal tropes for a First Contact story.

Everyone "knows" an Alien First Contact is supposed to take place in the USA and involve scientists meetings highly advanced aliens that are super prepared. Everyone "knows" the Aliens will either know absolutely everything, or somehow know absolutely nothing. It will be a cold unfriendly encounter that ends with either a Nasa scientist joining the Aliens for a trip, or the Aliens randomly ending up living in a walled ghetto and being used as an allegory to class and race conflict.

- So I needed to explain why this story does do what a First Contact story is "supposed to do". :) It's stuff I hinted at here and there, and drip feed over the course of many stories. But if I didn't "start the answer" here, folks would be asking why. When I first started talking about the story as I was writing it - I even got feedback on another website that amounted to a 'how dare you set it in Mexico, Aliens would never pick that place' - so I gave my Aliens an explicitly stated reason for that choice (the day I started the story, All I knew was I wanted it to be somewhere different, and then a Mexican song came on at random on my music stream... but after all this time, the choice actually works, and I've had a lot of fun learning more about Mexico as a result - I grew up around Mexican Americans, but they're very different).

The US does seem a *little bit* worse than IRL, I thought maybe a neo-fascist group came to power in the 2030s or something. Maybe Jan 6 worked out better for Trump in this reality ;) Provides a good reason to go elsewhere for sure! Although, might not have needed any more reason than the warm weather for these naked New Humans to land there, lol.

(You forgot Aliens blow up the Whitehouse!)

completely fire, I've never seen anything so emotional before

Really great. Even as straight sci-fi without the need for orgasmic allergy shots, it fully works.

And yeah, this is a universe that could spawn a lot of stories.