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The Aliens Who Knew, I Mean, Everthing is a 7000-word short story by George Alec Effinger, about a race of benevolent, but insufferable aliens. It was first published in 1984.
Spoiler Warning: Plot details and/or information about the ending follow. If you wish to enjoy the work first, stop reading here and return at another time.
Plot
The story is narrated by the President of the United States. An alien race called the nuhp arrives on Earth, and begin advising humans on everything imaginable. They show humans how to make the deserts bloom, how to end the problems of hunger and poverty, and how to master starflight. But in the desert, the only plant they grow is hollyhocks, which they insist is the most beautiful flower. They assert that the greatest of all human music is the score to "Ben-Hur" by Miklos Rosza.
They had very definite opinions about everything, and they wouldn’t admit that what they had were opinions. To hear a nuhp talk, he had a direct line to some categorical imperative that spelled everything out in terms that were unflinchingly black and white. Hollyhocks were the best flowers. Alexander Dumas was the greatest novelist. Powder blue was the prettiest color. Melancholy was the most ennobling emotion. Grand Hotel was the finest movie. The best car ever built was the 1956 Chevy Bel Air, but it had to be aqua and white. And there just wasn’t room for discussion: the nuhp made these pronouncements with the force of divine revelation.
James Polk, the nuhp insist, was the greatest American President, and the nuhp homeworld is still the most beautiful planet in the galaxy, although Earth is in the top ten. Eventually there are so many nuhp on Earth that almost every human has his own personal nuhp, telling what to think about everything. The nuhp say their own technology is not all that advanced (in fact, their huge spaceships are so big because they still use vacuum tubes; they even have to warm up their ships before they will fly). When human engineers finally adapt what the nuhp taught them about space travel, the great migration begins, as millions of humans are anxious to leave Earth and settle on other worlds, just to get away from the nuhp. In space, they find many alien species in the galaxy, and settle new worlds right along side these aliens, where everyone lives side by side in peace. And humans find that the one thing they have in common with all of these species is that they were all taught the secrets of space travel by the nuhp, and all of them left their own homeworlds mainly to get away from the nuhp and their insufferable opinions.
Reprints
This story has been reprinted in Donald A. Wollheim's anthology The 1985 Annual World's Best SF.
External Links
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