Full disclosure time: this story is why I am who I am. That's right. Science-teaching, spec-fic-writing, miniatures wargaming me. I was a lonely high school student (Bronx Science ftw!), and my school library had piles and piles of Analogs and Aasimovs, and in one of those, I found this story. I read it over and over again and it did things to me. I was never the same.
Oh, man, I love everything about this story. I love its optimism, I love its pacing and its craft, I love the space opera setting that it invokes, I love the circumstances of Humanity's introduction to this world, and I love the story yet to come that it implies. I love its vision.
Now, I'm a little more grown up than I was when I first read it, and there are things that annoy me. Yes, this story plays extremely fast and loose with astrophysics and sociology. I would kind have liked to read this story as written by Carl Sagan instead - same optimism, better science. Yes, the vision of mankind as intrinsically superior rankles a little. I like to imagine that it turns out that humans aren't better than the aliens, just faster, and our technology has all sorts of idiosyncratic gaps.
But I digress.
What matters is that for me, this story is the soul of science fiction. Show me the future, with all its complications and challenges. Show me a future worth living into. Show me my grandchildren standing astride the galaxy. In return, I will give you all my heart and all my hope, forever and ever, amen.
Additionally, the reading was exquisite. You guys really captured the complicated benevolence of these alien saviors, their petty rivalries and differences, and at the same time, their overarching kindness and heroism. I was impressed, and enjoyed it a great deal.