4 Imaginative First-Contact Tales That Will Make You Wonder if We’re Alone in the Universe

In this 12-part podcast, an astronaut finds herself stranded on a Saturn moon during one of the last manned missions in search of alien life. But after years of exploration have turned up nothing, can we believe her accounts? In the tradition of The Martian, writer Jackson Musker has loaded this immersive audio tale with research drawn from experts at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. It makes this astronaut-who-cried wolf adventure even more plausible.

First contact, in this debut, comes in the form of a mysterious alien structure that planetary colonists begin to refer to as “God’s City.” Narrated by the author, this novel is a unique reflection on religion, science, grief, and survival.

This is the ultimate classic of the first-contact genre—a story so vivid it brought some listeners of the original radio broadcast to panic, thinking it was real. Narrator Christopher Hurt does justice to the original tale, conveying all the drama of this fictional Martian invasion.

This classic of the genre explores what happens when we underestimate extraterrestrial life. The native inhabitants of Zarathustra may look to humans like cute fuzzy animals, but when it is suggested they may, in fact, be sentient a struggle ensues between the humans who want to protect them and the Company that wants control over their planet.