This book is about first contacts - intercultural spaces invaded and transgressed upon by explorers, both real and fictional.

Although the book focuses on British East India's exploration of the Andaman Islands, complete with illustrations, ship's logs, and official published reports, David Tomas uses this study as a jumping-off point for a wide-ranging discussion of first contact experiences, like the famous Orson Welles's radio dramatization, "The War of the Worlds," and Western recordings of endangered environmental and ethnographic sounds. Powerfully innovative, this book exposes the brutality one group of people can inflict upon another when they attempt to represent them in writing and photographs.

Tomas contends that such unthinking brutality continues today, and planes and automobiles serve as our sailing ships, transporting people from dominant cultures into spaces that rapidly become destabilized.