Hide and Seek

So this time I talking about that staple of science fiction; aliens. Specifically the questions of why haven't we found any yet? And of course if they are out there why haven't they come calling?

The simplest assumption is of course that the reason we haven't found any is there aren't any. Now this can't be ruled out based on the current evidence but I don't personally find it very likely since here on Earth we have a number of unrelated species who demonstrate at least rudimentary tool using behaviour and the history of evolution shows the same concepts reappearing time and again independently. Wings have developed several times in unrelated groups; birds, bats, and insects so I don't see any good reason to assume intelligence is some sort of singular aberration that only occurred here on Earth.

So lets assume the alien civilizations are out there, why haven't we found any trace of them despite scanning the skies with telescopes both optical and radio? I mentioned part of the answer in a previous blog, that is it's just over two decades since we first detected planets around other stars and we are just barely at the point where we might be able to detect the presence of an atmosphere around a planet. Trying to detect the traces of an industrial civilization; probably still decades away.
radio signal are apt to be even worse since as much as we think of it as empty space is filled with dust, gas, and radiation that makes picking up signals even a few light years away a lottery.

Of course the above assumes that the aliens aren't just going to turn up on our doorstep; or as the UFO believers would have it that haven't already done so. I must admit I was fascinated by the UFO phenomena when I was young; convinced that there had indeed been alien visitors to Earth. that belief crumbled in the face of the misrepresentation of so much of the alleged evidence and a greater understanding of the way in which human perception and memory can be so easily confused and deceived. On top of which there is the fact that with the rise of the cameraphone one would expect an upsurge in the quantity and quality of UFO image. Instead the number of UFO reports has declined almost in step with the increasing ubiquity of the cameraphone. So under the circumstances I'm putting UFO's to one side and assuming that the aliens haven't made contact with humans; at least not so far.

So assuming the aliens exist but haven't actually flipped any cows or carved up corn fields where the heck are they? Here's my top five possibilities:

You can't get there from here...

There may be a myriad of alien civilizations out there but there is no guarantee that they can cross the distance between the stars easily if at all. That dust and gas I mentioned earlier may be incredible tenuous but at the kind of speeds needed to travel to another star within a human lifetime they could be like flying into an endless series of concrete walls. There are ideas like generation ships that would travel far slower and avoid those problems but they would have to be vast and aren't likely to be cheap or numerous so our aliens might not stray far from home at all. Of course I write science fiction so I can't just dismiss the possibility of FTL out of hand.

A long time ago...

The simple fact is that a technologically advanced species might have arisen near to our own sun a 100,000, or a 1,000,000, years ago, come to Earth and colonized and we might well never know. The forces of nature have eroded the the cities of earthly civilizations to rubble in 10 or 20 centuries imagine what would happen over 100 or 1000 centuries? The species might well be extinct never mind their civilization. The galaxy might be littered with alien civilizations but they may be the province of archaeologists rather than diplomats.

...Far far away

Even if our aliens have FTL that's no guarantee that they will turn up and ask to be taken to our leaders; the galaxy after all is huge and liveable world may not be all that hard to come by. The vast interstellar empire (or Republic) spanning 1000's of stars might be out there right now; there could even be a number of them existing at the same time and yet in terms of the scale of the galaxy they would all be a drop in the ocean. The chances that they would interact let alone fight each other over territory is unlikely. Of course there's nothing to stop them having internal falling outs so there could be epic space battles being fought as I type and we will never know about; which is probably for the best.

Does it come in red?

There was a movie that shall remain nameless that had aliens visiting Earth who it turned out were 'allergic' to water. leaving aside the aliens stupidity it raised an important point; that is we rather assume Earth is a beneficent abode of life that other species would find every bit as appealing. I've mentioned the Asimov classic  'Nightfall' before and if the civilization from the world found Earth would they stop or hurry on by from a nightmare world that plunged them into darkness every twelve hours? There are so many possible variations in gravity, atmosphere, and climate that it's entirely possible our putative aliens simply find Earth an uninhabitable hellhole and have carried on to greener pastures.

Prime Directive

Yes it's a cliché but the aliens might not have come to visit for cultural reasons rather physical reasons. Now the Starfleet Prime Directive of non-interference might seem impossibly altruistic but such a directive needn't be so high minded; maybe the aliens are afraid we're going to start stealing their jobs and begging for aid if they make contact. It could also be that Earth is the interstellar equivalent of a bad neighbourhood and is off limits. Perhaps it's simply that the aliens have more in common with feudal Japan or ancient China and have no desire to meet other species and expose them selves to other cultures.

So there's my top five but I'm sure there's plenty more where they came from...

Grit in the Works

'Gritty reboot'; the phrase has managed to become a cliché in a remarkably short time. In essence it means taking some well known tale that's generally told with clear black and white definitions of who the bad guys and good guys are and adding shades of grey to blur the moral lines; making the fictional universe more realistic

Now in theory this can be a good thing. A problem that is prone to be pop up in fiction is that anyone whose good at their job can't really be one of the bad guys; doubly so if they happen to have a sense of humour. What this means is that these 'bad guys' are really good guys forced to serve the forces of evil by some outside factor. Some authors can't seem to cope with the idea that someone could be smart, charismatic, and charming; a person who is the the life and soul of the party one night and then gets up bright and early to order the execution of thousands. So yes the theory is good but the practice is all too often abysmal

The reason for this seems to be that writers seem to assume that 'gritty' and 'realistic' means 'lets make everyone a mean, despicable...well lets say 'jerk' to keep this blog family friendly. I personally think this is every bit as unrealistic as the idea of square jawed heroes and moustache twirling villains. Instead of clear black and white these 'gritty' stories often reduce everything to the same tone of muddy grey. Far from adding nuance and detail they simply obliterate it.

History shows that people are seldom all good or bad; business men who ruthlessly crush all competition and make a fortune only to turn around and spend that one on philanthropy and charitable works. Conversely there is the good neighbour who is warm, friendly, always happy to lend a hand; and just happens to wear a hood and burn crosses on the weekend. People are complicated and its no more realistic to portray them all as devils than it is to have them all be saints.

When Worlds Collide

So in a previous blog I railed against 'weird for the sake of weird' so this time I'm going to go in the opposite direction and ask; what do you do when reality itself turns out to be weirder than we imagined?

The realization that the sun was just one average star amongst many seems to have led to an assumption that the planets orbiting were also average and mundane, and that the nice neat arrangement with rocky bodies  close to the sun and gas giants in the outer was typical of the way in which solar systems form. Models were developed that described the mechanics of planetary formation and it wasn't just scientists who bought into this nice orderly image; writers of imaginative fiction were happy to go along with it.

Even where worlds were superficially exotic there was often that assumption of nice neat system mechanics overall; gas giants and rocky bodies knew their place and even if a world only saw night every thousand years (Nightfall) it was still relatively 'normal' in terms of the solar system it inhabited. The fundamental problem with all of this was it worked off a sample size of one; our own little solar system was the only one we could see. The best efforts of astronomers to find other solar systems met with no success; until 1992. Pulsar PSR 1257+12 was about the last place any one would have expected to find a planet since it was the remnant of a star that had long since vanished in a supernova. As it turned out this first discovery set something of a trend; what was a trickle of discoveries turned into a flood as we entered the 21st century and the Kepler space telescope added almost 3000 candidates and hundreds of confirmed new planets.

What became increasingly clear was that the nice neat ideas of planetary formation went out of the window almost overnight. Planets were found in all manner of bizarre orbits; worlds larger than Jupiter orbiting closer to their suns than Mercury does to ours. Some planets in fact orbiting so close that they are being slowly vaporized by their parent star; there's even a planet doing a fair impression of Tatooine out there.

So where does the dividing line lie between our bizarre universe and 'weird for the sake of weird'? Well the answer is that if you are adding something exotic and strange to give your story texture then that;s good; if you are adding it simply because you want to stuff in every cool idea that passes through your head or just to look 'cutting edge' then that's probably just WFTSOFW...

The Story so Far

So instead of pontificating tonight I'm just going to explain where I'm up to with my writing projects. Since I've posted up cover designs you can probably guess the 'Pioneer Wars: Secession Campaign' still hasn't reached a state fit to publish; or maybe it has but I don't quite know since the people who offered to proof read it never followed through. I've even started on the sequel 'Bridgehead Campaign'. This is not as dumb as it might sound; its helped me sharpen a couple of points in SC and it doesn't hurt to have the second book in a trilogy started just in case, you know, anyone ever reads the first one.

The first draft of 'Fourth Planet Problem' is finished. Only real snag in completing that was I chose a real island for the climax and got rather hung up on the geography so I had to rewrite a couple of scenes. Probably came together more readily because it had been so many stages of evolution before I started on the novel version. Now looking at some fairly painless revisions that are more about tidying up some elements that changed as the writing went along and then its just a matter of finding someone to proof read it and designing a cover; How hard can that be? Oh, right...

More Cover Art

So a lot of people deem to have problems with the plate/flag so I've done versions with and without. Comments appreciated as always.

Happy Endings

Once upon a time I was 13 (around about 1978 if you must know) and I started reading the 'Lensman' series by EE 'Doc' Smith. It was my first introduction to the big galaxy spanning space opera style of novels and being honest its shaped my tastes to this day. The worst moment of reading it was when I finished the last book and I had to face the awful fact that I would never know what came next; that I would have to part company with the characters who had come to mean so much to me. There have been other series I've been immersed in since but I was braced for the inevitable with those and of course from a certain perspective its a triumph for the author to have drawn in the reader and leave them wanting more. Alas these days it seems all too many authors in science fiction and fantasy can't bring themselves to leave that demand unfulfilled; they will give the readers more, and more, and more, until far from fearing the end of a series the reader is yearning for it.

The classic version of this is the series where the heroes have to beat some terrible enemy and after several volumes they triumph; except of course they don't. Soon enough there's a new book with a more powerful enemy, and then another, and another seemingly ad infinitum in some cases. If you want a good example try the 'Lost Regiment' series by William R. Forstchen; lovely books but with a massive power creep among the villains. By the last book it transpires that the monstrous but essentially nomadic and non-technological enemy  happen to have fully industrialized cousins on another continent who never came up in any of the EIGHT previous volumes.

Now this unwillingness to bring a series to an end is understandable sometimes; what starts out as a simple idea steadily expands and plans change. My own 'Fourth Planet Problem' story was exactly like that; it started as a short story and mutated into a full fledged novel. Where it becomes an issue that frustrates me as both a reader and a writer is where the books start to include great tracts of padding to spin out what might have one book in a series into two, or even three. This doesn't even address the current trend for branching off; that is where you have a main sequence of books and a veritable blizzard of off shoots focusing on minor characters or elements of the background of the universe but sufficiently entangled that missing one leaves you struggling to make sense of the rest, or worse they go over the same ground multiple times so the reader gets the same material again and again.

A writer has to care about the universe they are creating when writing science-fiction but there has to come a time when you write the last chapter and let it go; preferably before your readers die of old age.

Weird for the sake of weird

For those who don't recognize it the above is a quote from Mo the bartender in 'The Simpsons'. He explains that the new look of his bar is postmodern, and when this naturally draws a blank look from Homer he explains it as 'weird for the sake of weird'. This came to mind after reading a Jack Campbell short story the structure of which is a singe short scene constantly rewritten at the behest of a agent to make it more 'futuristic'. The effect is that a paragraph long lunch invitation becomes a page plus of impenetrable technobabble. So the question is when does 'futuristic' become 'weird for the sake of weird'?

Obviously when dealing with futuristic technology you need to offer up some explanation and a few made up words perhaps to describe it; you can't just have your spacecraft vanish from one star system and appear another with giving the process a name at least. The keyword here though is futuristic; do you really need to offer up and elaborate explanation of how a future phone works? Or a future gun? If you write 'the bolt of energy from the gun burned a neat whole through Smith's chest' would it really be better to offer a three paragraph explanation of the faux physics of the weapon. Sure you establish its futuristic credentials but by the time you reach the bottom of the page the reader may have forgotten that Smith was shot in the first place.

Language is another area where it seems some authors delight in inserting weirdness for the sake of it; one good example is in David Weber's 'Safehold' series. Set on a future colony long isolated from Earth everything is still described with nice comprehensible terms except for names; names use an odd spelling pattern that makes them very hard to read until you figure the scheme out. When you do you discover they are perfectly ordinary English names, now did this little conceit add anything to the book? I really don't think so. The focus needs to be the story and the characters, not having the reader trying to figure out why the author has used 'z' instead of 'j'.

Probably the worst example of 'weird for the sake of weird' is when an author changes human behaviour for their future society; often in the shape of some idyllic utopia where everyone lives in harmony, or in pursuit of some perfect society based on their particularly political ideals. The fundamental issue here is that people just don;t change. Their language and society may change but people remain the same. Archaeologists working at a fort called Vindolanda along Hardian's wall found what amounted to a collection of Roman postcards written by people at the fort. When these were translated did they reveal an alien, incomprehensible mindset? No; one of the best known turns out to be an invitation to a birthday party. There's also shopping lists and even a letter from a merchant complaining about the terrible state of the local roads. The better part of 2000 years later those Romans still come across as people like us and I don't seen any reason to pretend they will be 200 or 2000 years in the future. The author who writes his characters as 'utopian' or 'metahuman' is risking losing the suspension of disbelief needed for the reader to enjoy a story simply because they don't ring true.

So I suppose if there's a moral here its use your 'futuristic' elements sparingly and don't try to inject them into the human psyche.