Exploring the “First Contact Cafe”
Exploring the First Contact Cafe
First Published 11/30/2008
Greetings from the Dragon Lair of Irene Radford aka P.R. Frost, aka C.F. Bentley, aka Julia Verne St. John, aka Rachel Atwood, Phyl to my friends:
One of my favorite short stories, “It’s A Con World Afterall”, first appeared in a highly abbreviated form in the program book for RadCon in 2003 when I was Guest of Honor. At the time, RadCon was still primarily a regional gaming con with limited guests and paneling, 12 guests and about 800 members. Wow has that con changed in 5 short years. In 2008 the convention hosted about 2000 members and 175 guests. To tie in with the dominant membership in 2003 I wrote the short story based upon a world I’d created for an anthology and is now a featured part of my newest series “The Confederated Star Systems Volume #1: Harmony,” by C.F. Bentley from DAW Books August 2008 (now at Book View Cafe store).
Let’s back up a bit to another con. The programming committee of BayCon — Memorial Day weekend in San Jose, California – (ETA: now 4th of July weekend) put me on a panel entitled “First Contact Etiquette.” We explored the purpose of etiquette and the nature of first contacts. At some point an audience member (I think) reminded us that when you meet someone on the internet, you do not invite them to your home for a first face-to-face, you rendezvous at a coffee shop elsewhere in the city. So shouldn’t we also have a First Contact Cafe in space for that primary face-to-face meeting with aliens?
Bells rang in my head. Idea!
So I wrote a short story entitled “First Contact Cafe” in which humans first venture out into alien space to make a trade agreement. The story found a home in the Space Stations anthology published by DAW, edited by Martin Greenberg and John Helfers. I wrote two more stories, including “It’s A Con World Afterall” in that world that never found the right market.
And then I began the new series beginning with Harmony. I needed a space station for some delicate diplomatic negotiations. Why should I invent a whole new one when I had a design and an alien species in place with a plethora of stories buzzing in my head. So at the end of “Harmony” my characters land on the First Contact Cafe. In Enigma the sequel (DAW Books August 2009, now in Book View Cafe store) the majority of the action takes place on that space station. At this point I had to do some serious redesign of the station to make it work. Many thanks to my friend and collaborator (on a different story) RadCon Bob Brown for his help with the physics of the thing. Someday I’m going to pry off his hard drive the lyrics to a filk entitled “It’s A Con World Afterall.” I think you can guess the earworm of a tune.
So, welcome to the First Contact Cafe. I hope you enjoy my world and follow it around the universe.
You can find “Harmony,” “Enigma,” and the sequel “Mourner” plus the short stories on my page at the Café: https://bookviewcafe.com/bvc_author/irene-radford/