First contact, and the form you have to fill in

There is a moment every science fiction writer dreams about and dreads in equal measure, and it is the one where the alien finally turns up. We spend whole books getting ready for it. We build the ship, we staff it, we give the captain a bad knee and a complicated past, and then the great other arrives and the whole thing can collapse into something that belongs on a lunchbox.

I have a rule for that moment, and it will sound wrong. Make it boring first.

The grandeur is not the hard part

Anyone can write the big arrival. The light in the sky, the hush over the bridge, the music that is not in the text but you can hear it anyway. That writes itself, which is exactly the problem. A thing that writes itself has not been thought about, and the reader can feel the absence of thought the way you can feel a draught without finding the window.

What is actually hard is the hour after the arrival. Somebody has to decide who speaks first. Somebody has to work out whether the recording equipment is on. Somebody, and this is the person I always want to follow, has to open a logbook that was designed for cargo manifests and find a line to write the most important sentence in human history on.

Wonder is cheap. It is the paperwork afterwards that tells me whether to believe you.

People do not stop being people

The crews I write are tired and underpaid, and they do not become saints because the universe got interesting. When the signal comes in, one of them is still thinking about the argument they had at breakfast. One of them needs the bathroom and will not say so. This is not me making light of the sublime. It is me insisting that the sublime happens to actual people or it does not happen at all.

Readers know this in their bones. They have been present at their own enormous moments, a birth, a death, a letter that changed everything, and they remember that the kettle was still on, that the shoes still had to go somewhere. A future that forgets the kettle is a future I cannot live in for three hundred pages.

The form is the feeling

So yes, when the alien arrives in my books, there is usually a form. Not as a joke, though it reads as one at first. The form is where I put the feeling that is too big to say directly. A character staring at a box marked species and not knowing what to put is doing more emotional work than a page of awe could manage, because the reader has stared at a wrong box too, and known that no honest answer fits.

That is the whole method, if it is a method. Take the largest thing you can imagine, and hand it to the smallest, most ordinary process you can find, and watch what the gap does. The science has to hold. I have said that until people are tired of hearing it. But the person inside the science has to hold too, and people are held together, mostly, by small dull tasks done at the worst possible time.

I will keep writing the arrival. I am not made of stone. But I will always write the logbook first, and if I have done it properly, you will not notice that the grandest scene in the book is a tired person looking for a pen.

First contact gets the careful treatment in Signals in the Silence, where an astrophysicist, a sceptical physicist and a retired airline captain walk through the biggest question there is.