Meeting The Alien

Some of Poul Anderson's characters regularly meet and do business with peculiar-looking aliens. See Beljagor and Rax. However, imagine being in the presence of extraterrestrials with whom you cannot yet communicate and who might be merely concealing their hostility. You cannot read their body language and do not know what it means if one of them stands looking at you. Sf meets horror fiction again. Aliens, like mutants, are possible sources of horror.

Bedford escapes from the Moon but the Selenites, with good reason, kill Cavor. I know that the spaceship crew in Anderson's Planet Of No Return do not all wind up dead but I cannot remember exactly what does happen either. Anderson conveys the human characters' uneasiness in the company of the Rorvan which makes this novel sometimes uncomfortable to read.