"Not-pleasant! I am causing you not-pleasant!"

April 26, 2024 9:21 AM

The short science fiction story "Hello! Hello! Hello!" by Fiona Jones (published March 2024 in Clarkesworld) begins:

I express greetings and most joyful salutations!

I do not mean to interrupt you if you wish to be without company. It is only that I noticed you have been drifting alone for six flares of star-home-past-great-star-birthplace, and that is many flares! Your movement has been aimless, and I express concern!

posted by brainwane (32 comments total)

Pleasant! That has caused me pleasant!
posted by Don Pepino at 10:00 AM on April 26 [12 favorites]

What a lovely story! I was afraid that the non-pleasant vibrations might become very not-pleasant. But my seeking tendrils have found joy.
posted by ceejaytee at 10:01 AM on April 26 [7 favorites]

Jones did good. Lurking in the back of my mind as I read this was another story about two alien creatures making first contact ("They're Made of Meat!"), I express pleasure that my feeling tendrils were not spanked.
posted by mule98J at 10:07 AM on April 26 [6 favorites]

:)
posted by subdee at 10:11 AM on April 26 [1 favorite]

Yay!

Also, I should have mentioned: audio version available.
posted by brainwane at 10:14 AM on April 26 [3 favorites]

I thoroughly enjoyed this. I found myself pausing and thinking about what the alien was interpreting, and how it was making mistakes, and how fragile any communication is.
posted by gwydapllew at 10:15 AM on April 26 [5 favorites]

Also reminds me of some of the weird conversations from the wonderful "Star Control II: The Ur-Quan Masters". Happy campers.
posted by JSilva at 10:18 AM on April 26 [6 favorites]

Metafilter: I believe we understand one another perfectly.
posted by jedicus at 10:22 AM on April 26 [12 favorites]

Yes, very strong Star Control 2 vibes. Thanks for sharing!
posted by WedgedPiano at 10:28 AM on April 26 [1 favorite]

Very appropriate for this story to be published in Clarkesworld considering that the narrator bears such a strong family resemblance to the possibly intelligent plasma being ejected from the Sun during a solar flare in Arthur C Clarke's 'Out of the Sun' first published in 1947(?):

We were looking at what seemed to be a translucent oval, its interior laced with a network of almost invisible lines. Where the lines crossed, there appeared to be tiny, pulsing nodes of light; we could never be quite sure of their existence because the radar took almost a minute to paint the complete picture on the screen—and between each sweep the object moved several thousand miles. There was no doubt, however, that the network itself existed; the cameras settled any arguments about that.

I’d bet author Fiona Hill is well aware of this and sees their story as an homage, among other things, but that the Clarkesworld editor missed it.
posted by jamjam at 10:30 AM on April 26 [1 favorite]

Loved this!
posted by Wretch729 at 10:34 AM on April 26 [1 favorite]

jamjam: Clarkesworld is named after editor Neil Clarke, not Arthur C. Clarke.

If you can find Fiona Jones to ask her more about her inspirations for the story, I do hope you will do so and report back here! I have been having trouble finding contact information for her (especially as there is at least one other writer with that name) and hope she sets up a website soon. Maybe I'll ping the Clarion Foundation workshop folks, if only to get word to her that people here are enjoying the story.
posted by brainwane at 10:35 AM on April 26 [5 favorites]

Also reminiscent of fellow Clarkesworld story "The Things" by Peter Watts, though given the author and inspiration that one is a bit more... not-pleasant.
posted by Rhaomi at 10:42 AM on April 26 [7 favorites]

Do you think Neil Clarke chose the name of his SF magazine partly to take advantage of its resonance with a more famous Clarke or not, brainwane?

An editor with a different surname might not have been able to get away with it in these litigious times, at least.
posted by jamjam at 10:45 AM on April 26

Thank you for posting, this was a lovely story!
posted by overglow at 11:48 AM on April 26 [1 favorite]

There's a long history of sci fi short stories with the kind of body horror concept of "alien species that can get inside us" whether that's because they are a gel/ooze or in this case perhaps some kind of 4D sentient star. I would imagine the editors are as familiar as the rest of us.

This one was lovely.
posted by muddgirl at 12:02 PM on April 26 [3 favorites]

(like it is so comfy to imagine them diving into and out of a black hole to to tell it, fruitlessly, You are Not Alone!)
posted by muddgirl at 12:04 PM on April 26 [7 favorites]

Aw, how sweet. Thanks for posting it, brainwane!
posted by tautological at 12:29 PM on April 26 [1 favorite]

I liked this! It was nice!
posted by Hermione Dies at 12:36 PM on April 26 [1 favorite]

Vibrating gratitude at brainwane for her sharing of awesome stories!
posted by The Ardship of Cambry at 1:37 PM on April 26 [5 favorites]

I genuinely loved this. Also, it was impossible not to read it in the voice of Clare President, from Oh These Those Stars of Space.
posted by PikeMatchbox at 2:41 PM on April 26 [2 favorites]

Do you think Neil Clarke chose the name of his SF magazine partly to take advantage of its resonance with a more famous Clarke or not, brainwane?

This somewhat bizarre question actually has an answer:

"My name is Neil Clarke. Though it would be cool if Arthur C. Clarke was related in some way, as far as I can tell, he isn’t. The name of the magazine comes from the name of the bookstore. The name of the bookstore came from the name of the domain we owned. That domain was originally purchased as a site for my family, the Clarkes. So, as much as I admire his work, he wasn’t in my mind when any of this happened."

posted by advil at 3:01 PM on April 26 [12 favorites]

Very enjoyable!

For anyone interested in more like this, I recently read the novel Semiosis by Sue Burke, which includes a similar effort by a nonhuman, very alien intelligence to learn to communicate with humans. That story is much less light-hearted though, be aware. Also quite good though.
posted by biogeo at 3:26 PM on April 26 [3 favorites]

That was lovely! Thank you for pointing it out.

I, too, confess that until today I had always assumed that Clarkesworld was named after Arthur C.
posted by damsel with a dulcimer at 1:08 AM on April 27 [3 favorites]

Mod note: [Hello! Hello! This lovely post has been slipped into the sidebar and Best Of blog!]
posted by taz (staff) at 2:13 AM on April 27 [6 favorites]

I am best at vibrating greetings!


my imagination struggled with the inner movie for this and then abruptly decided upon a Golden Retriever made of plasma, with a waggy tail of solar flare and a tattered comet in its mouth
posted by The otter lady at 10:00 AM on April 27 [10 favorites]

re mi do DO so
posted by Reverend John at 10:43 AM on April 27 [2 favorites]

"I wave my seeking-tendrils, expressing notice-here!"

Alien for "Yoo-hoo!"
posted by Kabanos at 3:40 PM on April 28

I must be the only person on the planet or at least this part of it that doesn't understand what happened. :( I am not welcome at *this party*. My *camping* was not fun.
posted by Comstar at 4:39 AM on April 29

Comstar, this is my summary:

A non-human spacedwelling life form encounters a lone, lost human floating around in a space ship, enters the space ship, attempts to communicate with the human, freaks out the human with its very non-human communicative efforts, and leaves, not wanting to freak it out further. The non-human life form is haunted by the human's aloneness, though, and it can't just leave and forget about it, so it kind of hovers around, worrying. In the course of some hands-off investigations, it begins to suspect that the noises that the human makes are communicative efforts. It worries more and more about the human because the human is getting less and less large and moving around less and less. It's starving to death, IOW.

The non-human life form has a couple of consultations with other members of its species about how to handle the situation during the course of which we get a bunch of this species' cultural lore about communication and about how it is very bad to get hungry because you become a black hole or something; I sped through this stuff.

At some point the non-human life form re-enters the space ship and stays scrupulously away from the human and attempts to communicate human-style. There's a cute sequence where the human teaches the non-human a bunch of nouns, as humans typically do when teaching a language to a novice. The two life forms have greater success this time and the human is much less freaked out.

On a later visit, the non-human spacedwelling life form discovers the human all but lifeless and using its special spacedwelling powers, tows the whole space ship to a larger human space colony, which admits the space ship. Eventually, the human, all fed up and hale, flies out again to where our narrator has been hovering, and the two of them have a joyous reunion. H'raaaay!
posted by Don Pepino at 7:27 AM on April 29 [5 favorites]

the initial descriptors the POV character uses - "round, unable to change shape, energy inside" - were vague enough to convince me that this entire exchange was taking place between an energy being and the planet earth. possibly the discussion of non-human consciousness i was just reading had me inclined to imagine "what if earth was conscious?" and then imagine an alien communicating with it, but not with us. which would have been an interesting story, i think, and a fun spin on first contact.
posted by a flock of goslings at 9:38 AM on April 29 [1 favorite]

That was truly lovely, brainwane.

I loved the narrator's voice, all of it, but my favorite bit was this phrasing: "And when I awoke, I arrived to a thought:"

Thank you so much for sharing this with us. I love the things you find.
posted by kristi at 1:25 PM on April 30 [2 favorites]