30. Relativistic attack—one of this novel’s claims to originality is based on the motive that may drive alien species toward violent contact. It is not a motive based on any kind of territorial hostility; it is a motive based on simple, prudent self-defense: nothing outweighs even the distant threat of genocide. Star-crossing invaders will not come, as some older SF depicted, for our resources, to make us slaves, to settle the Earth, even to get our water and our women—or our men! Any culture capable of generating energies needed for interstellar flight would not want anything from us—except possibly to find out what we know and compare notes. Would they want to destroy us for the reasons stated in this novel?

The best we can say is that it may never happen, but that hope is not comforting. Perhaps alien cultures are not as scrupulously logical as we assume; but can we take that to the bank? Our radar beacons and leaked television signals may not provoke a response for a thousand years, or we may have a response in less than a century. What is certain is that we must think about what we are doing, in the light of what is possible and probable. And that is the bottom-line, grim reality that distinguishes “hard” science fiction from every other kind of writing: not that something is merely possible and interesting, or metaphorical, or even aesthetically pleasing, but that it is possible, probable, even likely; that it does not exist only in the imagination, but might confront us in our daily lives—as, for example, an asteroid strike that might destroy most of civilization, moving at a mere thirty kilometers per second (a snail’s pace and a mere hiccup compared to a relativistic cluster bomb).

Now is the time to think about relativistic contact, when we are still cradled in innocence, protected (perhaps) by our technological infancy, and no danger to anyone but ourselves.

-George Zebrowski New York, New York November 22, 1994

Other Avon Books by Charles Pellegrino:

FLYING TO VALHALLA
HER NAME, TITANIC


CHARLES PELLEGRINO & GEORGE ZEBROVVSKI
An AvoNova Book
William Morrow and Company, Inc.
New York

THE KILLING STAR is an original publication of Avon Books.
This work has never before appeared in book form. This work is a novel.
Any similarity lo actual persons or even1s is purely coincidental.

AVON BOOKS
A Division of The Hears Corporation
130 Avenue of the Americas
New York, New York 10019
Copyright © 1995 by Charles Pellegrino and George Zebrowski

Published by arrangement with !he authors
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 94-31367
ISBN: 0-688-13989-2