Hi guys,
Bit of a different post this time. Hopefully one that makes you think
a bit. But to begin with I put out Madness and Magic about a month
ago – really happy about that – and have got some nice reviews
for it which is great. And of course immediately after that, while I
probably should have been doing something useful, I started on a
brand new book.
But this one I actually completed!
The rough draft is now finished – (87 K in a month – don't tell
my editor!) and I'm tinkering with it at the moment. Turning it into
something more fun to read mostly. At the moment it's title is “The
Travel Bug” which is a bit of a pun and it's a sci fi – but not a
traditional space opera. There are no spaceships – a few flying
saucers though – and no epic space battles. Instead the action is
set mostly on Earth and the book is based on two basic ideas.
The first is astral travel and the idea that some people who
experience lucid dreams or astral traveling, are in fact actually
able to travel to the stars. And that scientists will one day be able
to record our dreams, meaning that these people, these actual astral
travelers will become the equivalent of astronauts. Traveling the
stars and bringing back all the wonders out there for the rest of us
to see and learn from.
This of course is not a new idea. There aren't a lot of new ideas in
fiction. And this one though it's been used a bit, mostly comes from
Simak's “Time is the Simplest Thing”, which is a really great
read and I recommend it. I fairly much recommend anything by Clifford
Simak.
But it's the other idea contained within the story that's really the
subject of this post. That we don't know and can't really understand
what alien actually is. And we won't be able to until we actually
experience it for ourselves.
This idea has been used all over literary fiction. If you read
Lovecraft you'll know that his great and terrible creatures aren't
just terrifying, but they overwhelm the understanding of his
characters. A few years back the movie Gareth Edwards film “Monsters”
came out and one of the central themes in it was that aliens while
dangerous and apparently determined to immigrate to Mexico, are
something we've just never encountered. The film tried desperately to
make us experience a concept of “alien” not really seen before. I
also recommend seeing this film, not so much because of the usual
things, but because it is an experience. A little bit on the mind
blowing side of things.
In “The Travel Bug” I wanted to take this idea and advance it. To
ask the question, what would people do if one day they encountered
something – an alien – that was completely beyond their
understanding? Would they be terrified? Shocked? Overwhelmed? How
would we deal with it?
This is actually an important question. We all know that the chances
that there is alien life out there are high. The chances that it will
visit us in the near future are quite a bit lower, but never the
less, we've come up with plans for dealing with that eventuality. But
every one of those plans that we've ever heard of centers around the
idea that there will be a commonality between our visitors and us.
That we will be able to understand them on some fundamental level.
But is that realistic? Will we be able to understand them at all? Or
will the sheer alien nature of them, completely overwhelm us?
I think this is a possibility we need to seriously consider. Because
I'm not sure that we are at all ready to understand what alien really
means. And yet we keep imagining that we are. And we even attempt to
justify our imaginings with theories that may have no more scientific
weight than candy-floss.
We can talk about concepts like parallel evolution meaning that
certain body types and ways of interacting with the world will be
universal. But really that's guesswork. Evolution has no plan, there
are multiple ways of interacting with the world we live in, and
worlds themselves may vary wildly. Is there actually any reason to
think that an alien water life form should look at all like a fish?
It may have evolved a completely different way of living in water.
And why should we assume that they think like us at all? Just because
they go to the trouble of visiting us, does that mean they actually
want to see us? Some of you will have read the story Roadside Picnic
in which the aliens came to Earth simply for some sort of stopover on
their journey and mankind wasn't even on their radar. They weren't
interested in us at all. And we're trying to interpret the items they
left behind in the belief that they left them for us. But really,
it's just rubbish that they tossed aside. The point is that we assume
aliens will be like us in some ways. That they'll behave in ways we
do. But I suspect that may be a mistake.
Assuming that some alien with funny ears may simply wander down the
landing ramp and tell us they come in peace, is likely a mistake.
Whatever arrives may actually ooze through the porous hull of its
vessel and then completely fail to recognize any form of intelligent
live on Earth as it really just came to look at the pretty sunsets.
And how would we deal with aliens? We want to think we're rational
people. But just as one example, what if what came down that landing
ramp was a human sized spider? We already know that a certain
proportion of people will run screaming in terror if that happened,
while others would find themselves rooted to the ground in terror. We
don't know why, but arachnophobia is a common human issue. We fear
spiders. They have too many legs, move in unpredictable ways and
we're frightened that they're poisonous. Yet the reality is that
they're mostly harmless. And we're far less terrified of dogs even
though vastly many more people are hurt by them every year. The
reason I suspect, is that we can sense a sort of kinship with dogs.
When a dog barks or growls, we can get a gist of their intentions and
what they'll do. Spiders are simply too alien, for want of a better
term.
But spiders are from Earth. We have far more in common with them than
any alien being that may come from the stars. So why not take that
phobic reaction we get from seeing spiders, and amp it up a thousand
times or so, to try and understand what our reactions to our alien
guests might be. Suddenly it might not just be a few people screaming
in terror, running away in blind terror, depositing the contents of
their stomachs on the ground, or standing rooted to the spot like
statues. It may be half the population.
And I can hear the doubters scoffing at this even now. They watch
horror movies. Nothing could scare them. Not like that. But my
counter would be that this wouldn't be a movie. It would be real.
There's no screen in front of you, constantly telling you that what
you're seeing is only a movie and that you're safe. Instead there may
be sounds and smells that simply make no sense. Actions we just can't
interpret. There's no way to predict how people will respond when
something truly alien walks into their life without the reassuring
safety net of a screen between them and us. But my guess is that it
could be very badly.
The gist of this blog is really that when it comes to aliens, we
don't actually know what alien is, and we won't until we finally meet
it. We also don't know how we'll react to it. And we won't even be
sure why it came. But the one thing we do have to do, is put away our
beliefs that we do. Because all our theories about aliens have rooted
deep within them, the idea that they'll be just like us in some ways.
And the whole point of being alien, is that they're not.
Cheers, Greg.
