I'm looking for a satiric short story about first encounter. (I probably read it in the seventies, so it's not so new). A UFO comes to Earth, and a pool-like thing comes out with alien-like octopuses in it. The humans try to make contact in every way possible: speech, music and films, but in vain. In the end, the aliens depart and we read their report, written by smell, saying that humanity is not worth making contact because they produce only weak smell. Can anyone remember this?
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4I'm sure it's not the story you're looking for, but you may enjoy "The Curse Of Fatal Death". youtube.com/watch?v=Do-wDPoC6GM– Gustav BertramCommented Nov 19, 2013 at 15:48
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1Also not what you're looking for, but this immediately reminded me of "The Scent of their Arrival" by Mercurio D. Rivera, which deals with smell-communicating aliens dealing with incoming first contact. It was published by Interzone in 2008, and is in his collection "Across the Event Horizon", if you're curious.– IMSoPCommented Jun 7, 2014 at 19:31
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1There were some captured aliens in a book called The Jupiter Theft by Donald Moffit who communicated by smell (and used it as an offensive weapon), I enjoyed the book a lot.– KalleMPCommented Mar 13, 2017 at 23:11
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1 Answer
The story you are looking for in Russian is called "Contacts will not" ("Контактов не будет"). It was written by Russian writer Ilya Varshavskiy (Илья Варшавский). What this story can be called in English - I do not know.
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1Possibly this ("The Conflict") from ISFDB? isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?53850 Commented Jun 7, 2014 at 18:41
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1@ImaginaryEvents Not The Conflict. That is about a mother who is jealous of her robotic nanny.– FruitbatCommented Feb 15, 2016 at 9:57
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I guess it would translate as "No further contact", but it may be the case that this story has never actually been translated into English Commented Jun 24, 2021 at 22:12