In IMHO there is currently a thread wondering if aliens are visiting Earth. What I’d like this thread to be about is the fictional tales of first contact between humans and non-humans.
Mine is a short story titled “Custom Fitting” A tailor in London is asked to make clothing for the first alien ambassador to Earth. He definitely isn’t human but his league’s policy is to dress in the style, as much as possible, of those he visits. There is some humor but the tailor takes his work VERY seriously, especially when he finds out the ambassador is to be presented at court.
“A Martian Odyssey”, by Stanley G. Weinbaum
“Old Faithful”, by Ray Gallun Contact, by Carl Sagan Project Hail Mary, by Andy Weir.
Basically what I like is showing some of the actual effort involved in learning how to communicate with each other. You can’t fill the whole story with that, of course, and at some point you need to scene-skip through to “And so, over time, they learned more and more of each others’ languages”, but you should spend at least some time on it. It’s cheating if you just have hyperintelligent computers, or telepathy, or whatever doing it for you.
It probably doesn’t count as my literal favorite, but I’ll toss in The Aliens Who Knew, I Mean Everything by George Alec Effinger. And All Seated in the Ground by Connie Willis.
Also from the “alien” viewpoint(humans have landed on the narrator’s plane). Goodbye, Ilha!. Included in the anthology Giants Unleashed edited by Groff Conklin
I’ll submit the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Darmok”. I always thought the universal translator was a cheat so it was satisfying to see first contact with a species they could not communicate with. And the idea that the aliens’ language consisted of metaphors was a unique take. It’s my favorite of the ST:TNG series. Darmok (episode) | Memory Alpha | Fandom
At the risk of stating the bleeding obvious, excellent examples in the movie category are Contact, for which the plot outline was written by Carl Sagan and his wife based on his 1985 book; Arrival (2016) whose focus is communication with aliens; and of course Spielberg’s cinematic spectacle, Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
There was a thread somewhere on Reddit in which aliens have invaded the Earth and found humans fairly easy to defeat, but get creamed by the fauna. I like that one.
Is the Effinger story the one where humanity leaves Earth because the aliens are insufferable know-it-alls? I remember reading that story, and this title sounds like a fit for the tone. There’s a hilarious scene where the aliens reveal their motherships are the size of cities because they never invented the transistor - they used vacuum tubes.