Letter 44 #2 – Review

By: Charles Soule (story), Alberto Jiménez Alburquerque (art), Guy Major (colors)

The Story: Everyone stay calm, and try not to die until oxygen is restored.

The Review: I don’t know what this says about my childhood, but I distinctly remember that my first exposure to aliens involved a lot of old-school TV: the Coneheads from Saturday Night Live, Spock on Star Trek, and Worf on Star Trek: The Next Generation.  Even as a kid, I found it puzzling that so many supposed aliens were basically humans with a lot of makeup on.  Now I see it as evidence of the difficulty people have in seeing beyond their own experiences.

The characters in Letter 44 all, to a certain degree, grapple with this same difficulty as they try to wrap their heads around the outer space visitors hanging out in the asteroid belt.  In explaining to Stephen why the Carroll administration took the steps that it did after the initial discovery of the foreigners, Dr. Portek offers a highly logical and straightforward analysis that’s still infected by all-too-human reasoning.  A big linchpin in his argument for defensive action is, “[i]f they wanted to learn about us, they would already be here talking to us.  Exploration and anthropology do not require constructs the size of the moon.”  But isn’t this an entirely terran framework Portek is using?  Who’s to say how an advanced species would approach its studies?