The Aliens

About this book

Two ships meet at the edge of a sun. Both are armed. Both are terrified. Neither speaks the other's language. The first illustrated paperback edition of Murray Leinster's The Aliens - the 1959 first-contact novella the cinema of summer 2026 is rediscovering, sixty-seven years late. The story The UN Space Survey ship Niccola drifts into the Theta Gisol system on a routine mapping run and meets the one thing humanity has been searching for and dreading for twelve hundred light-years: a ship from somewhere else. The crew names them Plumies, after the feathery crest on the silicon-bronze plaques their kind have been leaving on inhabited worlds for a century. Both ships fire. The rockets come home. The drives melt. The two hulls fuse by accident and begin to fall toward the local sun. Two crews, two species - and a few hours to decide whether the other is a thing to kill or a thing to understand. Leinster's answer, written by a man who had lived through two world wars and watched the Cold W