The Gentle Giants of Ganymede, by James P. Hogan

On the heels of James P. Hogan's first novel, 1977's Inherit the Stars, Hogan published The Gentle Giants of Ganymede in 1978.  In the first book, the discovery of a 50,000-year-old human corpse on the moon leads to more discoveries about a race of beings who lived in our solar system millennia in the past.  In Gentle Giants, a space ship from those millennia past shows up, beginning a new friendship between modern humans and their ancient, giant forebears.

Thanks to the Ganymeans' sophisticated AI, like Siri only much, much more powerful, the language barrier is quickly breached.  The Ganymeans confirm much of what the human researchers had pieced together, and a friendship bond between the few hundred Ganymeans and the humans develops.  The humans welcome them with open arms.  I like the fact that Hogan doesn't rely on melodramatic scheming and plotting between or among the different races.  Maybe it's a utopian dream that races and species can have first contact without a conflict, but I enjoyed what Hogan did with this story.

Hogan works in legit science with anticipated alien science, all while anticipating future science.  Like other great sci-fi writers (yeah, I would consider Hogan one of the greats), he doesn't let the science bog down the story but includes it almost like a character in the story.  Gentle Giants is even better than Inherit the Stars and is a great set up for book 3.