"The kind of classic fifties-era first-contact story that Jonathan Swift
might have written, if Jonathan Swift had had a background in game
theory."
-- (Hugo nominee) Peter Watts, "In Praise of Baby-Eating"
Three Worlds Collide is a story I wrote to illustrate some points on naturalistic metaethics and diverse other issues of rational conduct. It grew, as such things do, into a small novella. On publication, it proved widely popular and widely criticized. Be warned that the story, as it wrote itself, ended up containing some profanity and PG-13 content.
- The Baby-Eating Aliens
- War and/or Peace
- The Super Happy People
- Interlude with the Confessor
- Three Worlds Decide
- Normal Ending
- True Ending
- Atonement
PDF version here.
This was an interesting thing to read about, though I have to say the start, with the baby eaters, was the best and most interesting part. The babyeaters were, by human standards, unconscionably evil, but ironically, were actually probably much less so than the happy-happy. Indeed, the sad irony was that the happy-happy were far, far less capable of understanding humanity than the babyeaters were - and I think that the humans could have found peace with the babyeaters. But the happy-happy lack what the other two races possess.
The sad thing is that humans could probably beat the happy-happy rather easily, though. The happy-happy were horrified to the point of nearly being broken by the babyeaters. Humans are capable of coming up with far, far worse things than the babyeaters. If you were to give that to them, wield it as a weapon, you could potentially make a basilisk - and if sufficiently clever in its design, it might well completely annihilate them due to their culture's inflexibility. Indeed, it is obvious that despite what they claimed, pain was not truly something that was so completely alien to them - they did not experience discomfort in the same way that humans did, but it was clear that they DID experience such things, as they had difficulty coping with what the babyeaters fed them and retreated to their happy fun time chamber "as a reward".
Of course it would be insanely dangerous, but they hardly had many good options, did they? The other problem is that leaving the happy-happy be could potentially expose other races similar to humanity to them.
Sadly humanity never had the chance to get anything from the happy-happy; the poor babyeaters ruined that for them. It might have helped.