Five Books About Aliens Who Are Fed Up With Humans

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

https://reactormag.com/five-books-about-aliens-who-are-fed-up-with-humans/
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On 2025-07-09, James Nicoll <[email protected]> wrote:

Five Books About Aliens Who Are Fed Up With Humans

Yelling "Get off my lawn!" on an interplanetary scale... https://reactormag.com/five-books-about-aliens-who-are-fed-up-with-humans/

In Greg Egan's _Quarantine_, the aliens have wrapped the solar
system in an artificial event horizon, cutting it off from the rest
of the universe. Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going
out.

--
Christian "naddy" Weisgerber [email protected]

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Christian Weisgerber <[email protected]> writes:

On 2025-07-09, James Nicoll <[email protected]> wrote:

Five Books About Aliens Who Are Fed Up With Humans

Yelling "Get off my lawn!" on an interplanetary scale...
https://reactormag.com/five-books-about-aliens-who-are-fed-up-with-humans/

In Greg Egan's _Quarantine_, the aliens have wrapped the solar
system in an artificial event horizon, cutting it off from the rest
of the universe. Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going
out.

Wasn't that the final line in Clark's story "The nine billion
names of god"? (why nine? would have made more sense as
the four billion names, with a unsigned 32-bit overflow :-)

Foster's _With Friends Like These_ also had a story where aliens had quarantined the solar system...

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Scott Lurndal <[email protected]> wrote:

Christian Weisgerber <[email protected]> writes:

On 2025-07-09, James Nicoll <[email protected]> wrote:

Five Books About Aliens Who Are Fed Up With Humans

Yelling "Get off my lawn!" on an interplanetary scale...
https://reactormag.com/five-books-about-aliens-who-are-fed-up-with-humans/ >>

In Greg Egan's _Quarantine_, the aliens have wrapped the solar
system in an artificial event horizon, cutting it off from the rest
of the universe. Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going
out.

Wasn't that the final line in Clark's story "The nine billion
names of god"? (why nine? would have made more sense as
the four billion names, with a unsigned 32-bit overflow :-)

It is, and it is explained in the story. The monks are using a character
set with an unstated number of symbols, no more than three consecutive identical symbols, and from one to nine characters. I think with some combinatorics you could work out the number of symbols used (which
required custom printer modifications).

Devanagari has 48 characters, both vowels and consonants, and whatever set
the monks are using it has a whole lot fewer than that.
--scott

--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

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On Wed, 09 Jul 2025 14:05:14 +0000, James Nicoll wrote:

Five Books About Aliens Who Are Fed Up With Humans

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

Yes, your reaction to "The Turning Place" is wrong. Humans matter
in a way that other forms of life on Earth do not.

The final two novels, in which it's humanity that is at fault,
particularly the second-last one, do not sound interesting to
me because of their distressingly un-Campbellian nature.

Not that I approve of John W. Campbell's straitjacket for science
fiction, but stories can go too far in the opposite direction.

John Savard

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