Illegal alien
From back cover Ace paperback January 1999: When a disabled spaceship enters the Earth's atmosphere, fear is quickly replaced with awe. Seven members of the incredibly advanced Tosok race are welcomed by the world with open arms, and the people of Earth put their best face forward. Then a popular scientist is found murdered. All evidence points to one of the Tosoks. For the first time, an alien is tried before humans in a court of law. And in the unprecedented trial, where two cultures clash, there may be far more at stake than the accounting for one human life...
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What Hacker News says
- I'm curious: What disgusts you about it? Assuming "meat is meat", is there a difference for you between "grown in a sunlit grassy field" vs "grown in simulated conditions"?
Going Further: in "Illegal Alien" by Robert J Sawyer, there is mention of "grown meat", basically meat "grown in and squeezed out of a tube" from a spaceship's bulkhead which crew-members slice out for personal consumption as needed during space flight. Would this also be disturbing?
- An amazing actual coincidence is that the sun and moon appear almost the same size as each other from the surface. The opportunity for such perfect total solar eclipses (with naked-eye visible Baily's Beads) is not common in the universe.
There is at least one short story (the title escapes me) that suggests that our #1 tourist attraction for visiting aliens would be total solar eclipses.
edit: Found it, maybe. This does not sound like the one I read.
> Illegal Alien, by Robert J. Sawyer (1997). An alien visits Earth, supposedly for "research purposes", and observes a total solar eclipse. He then speculates that Earth may be the only planet in the entire Universe whose moon covers its sun perfectly (with only transits or occultations occurring on other planets).
