The Extraterrestrials Are Coming! The Extraterrestrials Are Coming! by Peter Wood (Asimov’s SF, September-October 2022) opens with the narrator, Savannah Myles, on a Western Alliance space station when the alarm goes off. She goes to the flight deck and we learn that (a) the female captain is her ex-girlfriend as of three weeks ago, (b) an alien spaceship moving at 60 times the speed of light is heading towards them (the aliens have somehow managed to message the station to let them know they are coming), and (c) Savannah is now attracted to Ingrid, another crewmember (even in the midst of the this momentous occasion we are told, “Ingrid was 100 percent the opposite of my hard-drinking, up-for-anything-anytime, blowing-off-work ex-husband”).
The rest of the first half of the story seems to be as concerned with Savannah’s interpersonal concerns as it is with the impending First Contact, and one of the other things we get throughout the story is a lot of literary name-dropping:1
I read the recreation activities wipe board. Canasta tournament Saturday. Book
Club tonight. Catcher in the Rye. Good God. We had just finished The Bell Jar. Somebody should write a book where the two depressed 1950s NYC protagonists find each other. Of course, I was a fine one to criticize depression.
I wanted to tell Ingrid a few things. Again. But I couldn’t go down that road. I shared the blame for our problems anyway. I signed up for station duty to escape a nasty divorce and then jumped right back in the water. p. 143
Also mixed in with all of the above are a quirky robot called Yossarian (named after the Catch 22 character, presumably), and various messages from two feuding political parties on Earth, one of which looks likely to be replaced by the other around the time of the alien ship’s arrival (elections are currently taking place).
This all comes to a head when (spoiler) the two political parties’ spaceships arrive at the station at the same time as the aliens do. Then, when the opposition party ship subsequently attempts to dock with the station after being refused permission by the ruling party, it rips a hole in the superstructure. The crew have to abandon the station, and the aliens are not impressed with the squabbling politicians, so much so they make to leave. Only Savannah’s impassioned plea to the aliens that all humans are not the same (they just elect the politicians) stops them leaving.
There is the seed of a decent story here, and some amusing dialogue with Yossarian the robot, but the story can’t seem to decide if it is a First Contact story, a domestic soap opera, a literary salon, or a political satire. Consequently, it is a bloated mess (and one with an odd title).
* (Mediocre). 7,450 words.
1. As well as the two titles above, we also see mention of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, Ulysses, Things Fall Apart, Moby Dick, Anna Karenina, and Bartleby the Scribner (I think this latter is meant to be Bartleby, the Scrivener, unless I have missed some joke). There are also references to Pablo Picasso, Jorge Luis Borges, and Ursula K. Le Guin (this latter is followed by an unconvincing, “Greatest writer of the twentieth century”.)