Help me find a science fiction (short?) story.

April 24, 2006 6:38 PM

Help me find a science fiction (short?) story.

My father is looking for a science fiction story. Here are the details:

Probably more than 40 years old
Involves aliens landing on Earth (probably)
Involves Earth having more sophisticated weapons (definitely)
Involves Earthlings missing something basic about space travel, and instead focusing on weapons (probably)
Involves aliens missing something basic about weapons, and instead focusing on space travel (probably)
Involves flintlocks (maybe)

My understanding of the story is as follows: Aliens invade earth, and we stop them very quickly. It turns out that either we figured out something difficult about weaponry, or they figured out something difficult about space travel. So they come to invade us with incredible space travel technology, but no weapons. We have weapons, but no space travel technology.

Seems like a decent premise, but I don't have enough to go on to find it.

posted by bh to Media & Arts (7 answers total)

"The Road Not Taken" by Turtledove, most likely.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 6:56 PM on April 24, 2006

As noted about, "The Road Not Taken", by Harry Turtledove, which was a prequel to another short story of his, "Herbig-Haro" (though that was originally published under his pseudonym of Eric G. Iverson).
posted by fings at 7:09 PM on April 24, 2006

Huh. I was thinking it must be Eric Frank Russell, but I don't have a title to give you, and it sounds like people are pretty definite about the Turtledove. I'll have to read it; sounds interesting.
posted by languagehat at 6:12 AM on April 25, 2006

This put me in mind of a story where the humans and the aliens have different perceptions of time and space which results in the humans being able to advance lots and lots faster than the aliens (once they have the alien spaceships (IIRC)). A shortish story I think, does that sound like the one you're after? Will try and think who wrote it.
posted by biffa at 8:25 AM on April 25, 2006

The coolest part is that we would be able to steal their spaceship technology at gunpoint and then fly to their planet and conquer them with our superior weapons.
posted by nanojath at 2:25 PM on April 25, 2006

A google search revealed unto me that the story (The Road Not Taken) is currently part of the etext.org archive. Apparently this one was originally published under the Iverson pseudonym as well.

http://www.etext.org/Zines/ASCII/ThereAintNoJustice/tanj.070
posted by fings at 1:44 PM on April 26, 2006

The general theme of Terrans being somehow superior to aliens with nominally more advanced technology is reasonably common in SF. However, the story your dad is probably thinking of is "Pandora's Planet" by Christopher Anvil. It was originally a short story in Analog magazine. Some additional short stories with the same theme and characters were written and it eventually became a novel. The one you want is http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/a/christopher-anvil/pandoras-planet.htm. I strongly recommend the original over the recent version edited by Eric Flint.

There's a nice series of books with a similar theme by Alan Dean Foster, starting with A Call to Arms.

You might think of most of SF as belonging to this 'human triumphalist' sub-genre, if you look hard enough. These are usually great reads. Harry Turtledove's TRNT discussed above is an excellent example.
posted by gdf at 8:06 PM on May 7, 2006