When the topic of a novel is First Contact, as the past thirty-odd Cawdron novels have been, they almost by default have to address the notion of alien intelligence. In his previous novel, “Love, Sex and the Alien Apocalypse,” Cawdron’s alien was utterly flabbergasted by the notion that intelligence could exist in billions of tiny, bite-sized units, rather than as a vast distributed hive mind. I noted at the time that we were similarly coming to grips with the notion that octopuses were intelligent, and our reaction paralleled that of the invaders in LSAA