james_nicoll

What is this "x minus one"?

A radio play series from the fifties that you can listen to on YouTube. James teases us by refusing to supply links to the relevant YouTube pages.

Should I start adding links?

I found the archives easily enough. The story author would be useful to know what you're talking about.

Should I start adding links?

It would benefit the curious. I would.

I will do so in the future.

I hope he doesn't waste anyone's time linking to YouTube! The pointlessness of sending people to a video site for audio shows aside, they're available as MP3s on archive.org - meaning you can actually listen to them when you feel like it, not just when you're sitting at a computer.

I am shamed by my inferior google-fu.

Do we count insects as "animals" or do we just mean "things we usually call animals, which would be pretty much all vertebrates and some really big crustaceans"?

If it includes the insects, that's gonna be a bad collapse. If it includes everything that isn't of _Plantae_, everything's pretty screwed -- no bacteria, no fungi, no decay...

In a few hundred million years you'd have something back to the level of the old days, probably -- you'll still be starting with some sort of living creatures and they'll evolve into... something.

It's entirely within the character of the aliens to have killed the insects too.

The aliens made no sense, really: not only did they have no fatal diseases, no cancer-equivalent, but they didn't seem aware of such things as poisonous animals. Theory: their own planet was destroyed a looong time ago, and they are the descendants of a tiny remnant that survived in entirely unnatural conditions in space habitats, perhaps with a handful of genetically engineered life-cycle maintaining life forms. Only recently have they developed FTL travel and begun to encounter planets with developed ecosystems - something which they are ignorant as dirt of.

Bruce

The radio adaptation doesn't make a lot of sense, but as I recall, it was puffing up to 26 minutes a story which was originally, like, two sentences. It's a cute gimmick but they really should've done what they did with a couple Ray Bradbury pieces ('The Veldt' and 'Zero Hour', I believe) and done a collection of cute little story-ettes.

I assume I read this -- last man on earth story, hugging rattlesnakes?

The story stuck with me for years because of how little sense it made.

It's a kind of SF story that used to be relatively common: supposedly advanced aliens show up, are shown up by a trick on the human side that would make a ten year old blush to have fallen for it. Aliens are tremendous saps, apparently.

This was superseded by the New Wave, in which humans are tremendous saps, apparently.

'Aliens are stupid' is one of those themes which is evergreen: see H. Turtledove's Worldwar/Colonization series, for instance. Or pretty much any alien invasion-themed film of the last twenty years.

Bruce

I always hated this theme

For a broadcast SF example see the Babylon 5 episode where Ivanova manipulates an ancient alien using reverse psychology that the average six-year-old would treat with icy disdain.

-- Paul Clarke

Every once in a while a find a story where humans and aliens badly misjudge each other because aliens do not think/act/react like humans -- and each side expects the other side to behave like it does. Invariably humans are first ones to figure it out, at which point it becomes a "humans run rings around dumb aliens" story.

"Out of the Dark" which I mentioned on another thread is unusual in several ways: it is aliens who first figure out how humans think (granted they cannot use that knowledge effectively), and despite all unlikely advantages Weber heaps onto humans, aliens are still bound to win[1] until he pulls deux ex noir.

For a broadcast SF example see the Babylon 5 episode where Ivanova manipulates an ancient alien using reverse psychology that the average six-year-old would treat with icy disdain.

What would be hilarious is a human attempting reverse psychology on a naive and trusting alien, who proceeds to enthusiastically do what she asked, i.e. opposite of what she wanted

[1]For unsatisfactory value of "win" -- aliens realize that they cannot subjugate humans, and settle for genocide.

If you have a couple hundred survivors, why would mobile heterotrophs need to re-evolve? You've got them right there.

If you really wiped out all motile multi-cellular organisms, hmm. I'd guess re-invention from the protists, not newly mobile plants.

The aliens kept one breeding pair each of about 100 species and by the time they left, one or the other of some pairs had died. I think the odds are not bad all of the animal species will die out within generations.