The Forge of God (Forge of God, #1)

by Greg Bear

How many years of fictional paranoia had conditioned him to be dubious of extraterrestrials bearing gifts? Of all the motion pictures made about first contact, only a bare handful had treated the epochal event as benign.

Actually, this book does have a lot of similarities to sci-fi movies. It's like a dark version of "Independence Day".

“We’ve been sitting in our tree chirping like foolish birds for over a century now, wondering why no other birds answered. The galactic skies are full of hawks, that’s why. Planetisms that don’t know enough to keep quiet, get eaten.

The Soviet Union, he had acknowledged, was stronger than ever—apparently—but faced enormous problems coordinating the nations and peoples it had absorbed, problems that others thought might prove fatal in the long run.

Indeed, even in the short run, as it turned out.

All the arks could save was what humans had so far learned about themselves. Hereafter, they would be refugees with no hope of ever returning to a homeland, no hope of recovering the thread of the pasts they had lost.

This was a deep thought, and a sad one.