Monthly Archives: January 2013

January 30, 2013 · 8:45 pm

Alien Inversion

So, the question I am taking up now is:  What can we learn about ourselves by encountering an alien? 

Easy answer Number One: We can learn how quickly our underwear can be soiled.

Easy answer Number Two: Can a man wearing sneakers reach speeds approaching the speed of light?

Easy answer Number Three: …Well, I could only think of two that were even slightly funny.

The truth is, the thing we would most likely take away from a close encounter of the Third Kind is a deeper understanding of what it truly means to be a human being from planet Earth.

We live on a planet where people once thought the Earth itself was the center of the universe and even the sun orbited around us.  The Bible speaks of angels watching the ways of men on Earth and being impelled to “adore and draw near.”  Are we really as vain as all that?  Well, unfortunately, yes, we are.  People believe that God created the universe for mankind and put us in dominion over all the beasts in the fields, the birds in the air, and the fish in the ocean.  It would serve us right if an alien came down to planet Earth and decided humankind were basically only good for another in a long series of exotic items on the menu.  If that happens, the best we can hope for is that we don’t taste very good.

aliens

What would an alien be able to teach earthlings?

I think, though, that it is by noting the differences between a human being and a traveler from a distant planet in a solar system not our own that we really would gain the most insights into what makes us special and unique.  We would clearly discern that an alien who can travel interstellar distances to reach Earth would make us feel like total dim-bulbs when it comes to science.  They know Science with a capital S.  We only know science like the time in Miss Murphy’s class when we cut open a frog and saw all the nasty-colored squishy bits.  We take clocks and small engines apart.  Sometimes we can’t correctly put them back together.  They can take complex biological systems, brains and eco-systems for example, and put them together as easily as finishing a jigsaw puzzle that only had four pieces.

So is that the only meaningful comparison?  We are much stupider than they are?  Not by a long shot.  Advanced, super-smart alien societies will have lost the ability that goes with being stupider… er, I mean, being simpler in their understanding.  They will have lost the ability to wonder and be amazed.  They will have lost the ability to be thrilled to their core at encountering something that no man has ever seen before.  They will simply have protocols in place for dealing with anomalies they have not previously encountered.  How dead, boring, and sterile is that?  It doesn’t make us superior in any way, but we have so many um-gollies ahead of us in the realm of interstellar travel that I would not trade places with even the best of them.  What is an um-golly, you say?  That’s when you see that bright pulsing light hovering above the pavement of Highway Three after midnight, and the green man with a fin on the top of his head instead of hair comes out to meet you.  And what do you say?  “Um… golly!”

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January 23, 2013 · 10:24 pm

The Alien in the Classroom

As an ESL teacher, or English as a Second Language Teacher, I do firmly believe that anyone can learn to speak English if they have a mouth to speak with, ears to hear with, and a brain that does at least a little more than hold the ears apart.  There are ways to get through to an English beginner who already speaks another language fluently.  You use body language, simple, repeated words and phrases, picture dictionaries, and enough patience to melt down the next ice age.  But how would it work with an alien who not only didn’t have a green card, but wasn’t even familiar with life on this planet?

Well, the Tellerons in my book Catch a Falling Star already come with a working knowledge of English since they grew up watching American TV programs from the 50’s, 60’s, 70’s, and early 80’s.  If you live about nine light years away from Earth, you can watch shows that are older than nine years.  In fact, TV helped the Tellerons leap to the erroneous conclusion that we were ripe for conquest.  Who wouldn’t want to invade if the enemy were all as stupid as Gilligan and the Brady Bunch?  So, let’s suppose the alien youth who enters my classroom straight from the enrollment center is not human, and not a Telleron.  Let’s suppose he is from a planet in the Epsilon Indi star system, Epsilon Indi Four.  That planet has some interesting kiddos to send my way.

They call their planet Galtorr Prime, in their language “Gaahl Toor Onssi”.  They are humanoid in shape, but are actually tailless saurian people, looking all reptilian and toothy-scary.  Green and brown are their ordinary scale colors, and their bright green eyes have vertically-slitted pupils like a poisonous snake.  They speak only Hiss Language and have trouble making the sounds of English that require a mobile lip.  Young Dathoo the Lizard Boy is quite a handful in my classroom.

The first challenge is to get the Hiss speaker to realize that in this country we are not allowed to eat our classmates.   Asking the girls to show him how humans make their eggs is a no-no too.  Beginning speakers can often get frustrated trying to sort out the wondrous mish-mash of words that is English, but they must learn that not being able to say something correctly the first few times does not require the invocation of the Galtorrian Death Ritual.  I also have to remember to teach him to leave his laser plasma gun in his sub-orbital vehicle in the parking lot.

After a month and several trips to the doctor with serrated bite wounds, I have young Dathoo speaking all the important phrases like; “Yes, oh wise and wonderful teacher, I will do that immediately,” and “Teachers deserve to make as much money as corporate CEO’s.”

Okay, so if an alien child from another world wanted to come to my classroom, I could do that.  But if it’s okay with the powers that be, I would really rather you picked some other teacher.

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January 16, 2013 · 6:49 pm

To be Real or Not to be Real? Science Fiction Vs. Reality

BookCover

Is the line between science fiction a bit blurry?

I think reality is the one thing that is most critical to science fiction.  If you don’t have something real in the story, then you are missing the science part.  But the key to that particular treasure chest is in how you mix the reality, also known to some as the truth, with the story, also known to some as the pack of lies.  So let me tell you a lie–er–a story about how I tried to build some reality into my little work of science fiction.

1990 was not the year I had the inspiration for the story.  That actually came much earlier, in my misspent youth back In the 1970’s.  Now, I won’t try to tell you that I had any close encounters of the third kind back then other than in a movie theater, because after all, some lies are too big and hairy for even me to believe.  The movie theater had a huge influence on my imagination, as did the Saturday matinees on the television, but the only true parts of that whole mess is how people think and feel in reaction to certain situations.

I could claim a kinship with Davalon and the fact that he was accidentally left behind on Earth because I was accidentally separated from my family at the Mason City Air Show.  I know the Mason City Airport isn’t a very big one to get lost in, but there were lots of people there, and I was a dumb kid at the time.   I could draw on that wonderful mix of panic, fear, and exhilaration at being completely on my own to help me plot out how a lost alien child would think and act in a small Iowa town.  Naturally he would immediately get himself run over on the highway.  That’s how it works, isn’t it?  Oh, wait, I didn’t actually get run over at the Mason City Airport.  That’s one of the big white lies I am trying to separate from truth here.

1990 is significant enough to use as the first word in a paragraph twice because that was the year of both Voyager 2 flying out into the outer darkness after having encountered and photographed  the huge gas planets Uranus and Neptune, and the year that a real invasion occurred when Iraq decided to invade Kuwait.  Both of those events get an obscure reference in my story because real events, even events that most people try to ignore, can make a pack of lies, er, story seem real.

old-teacher

Everyone has a Ms. Rubelmacher–inspirational by default

1990 is also the year I sat down at my electric typewriter and began pecking away at my first draft of the story itself.  1990 is also the year that happened 101 years after the events in 1889, when Theofrastus Wallace and Thornapple Seabreez flew a passenger train with Pullman coaches all the way to Mars.  Of course, that last bit is totally irrelevant because it didn’t actually happen.  It is just another pack of lies–er—story that I chose to tell as a screwy plot device to mix up the lies further and make the whole project murky at best.

So… Oops, wasn’t this paragraph supposed to start with 1990 also?  I guess not, because it’s all about how you have to use some real science to get your sticky little hands on a label of science fiction for your story.  Here you have to make use of all those glorious little facts and details you learned in science class when you were supposed to be paying better attention to what Ms. Rubelmacher was teaching.  Here I could place the notion that amphibians absorbed moisture and nutrients through their skin into my story about amphibianoid aliens.  I could also use the notion that fusion engines could be fueled by the water droplets in steam, and the imaginary anti-gravity engines were able to make a train fly.  I could use my knowledge of Martian Geography to help set part of the story on Mars, again thanks to the fact that Ms. Rubelmacher’s teaching was so boring, er, exciting that I actually had to read ahead in the textbook rather than listen.

So here we have a restatement of my thesis and a summation about all the idiocy, er, wisdom that I have to impart about how you mix what is real with what is a bald-faced lie, er, fictional story.  It boils down to this… Any good liar, er, con man, er, story-teller… yes, I mean story-teller, mixes just enough factual and verifiable stuff into the mix to make the lie, er, story believable.

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January 9, 2013 · 8:43 pm

The Reasons I Put it in my Pocket

I wrote Catch a Falling Star. Believe it or not, my comedy science fiction novel is about real people.  Oh, I changed a few things to make them harder to recognize.  I changed their names, and who they are related to, and what religion they really were, and I even made some of them green.  But honestly, they are either characters I grew up with back in my little home town in Iowa, or people I have known in my career as a public school teacher.  A few of the brighter ones are combinations of both.

I first created the story idea, back in about 1977, around a pair of frumpy farmer types who desperately wanted a child of their own and couldn’t have one.  They are natural-born parents from medium-large Iowa families, and in real life they do have kids of their own.  I just imagined what they would be like if they never had a child of their own.  And then, I gave them one, but not a normal one.  It had to be an alien born in orbit around Barnard’s Star and accidentally left on Earth during a blurped-up attempt by the aliens to conquer the Earth.  They were incompetent aliens who had been adversely affected by watching too much Earther television.

I have always been a story-teller.  Anybody from the town of Rowan, Iowa who remembers me will attest to that fact, probably with certain air-curdling metaphors of the obscene variety attached to the recollection.  I renamed the town Norwall so nobody would recognize it (all the same letters, but all stirred up, and with two L’s added for Love and Laughter).   Rowan… I mean, Norwall is a small town of about 250 people counting the squirrels (and you have to count the squirrels because they are some of the funniest people in town).  It’s a small rural farm town with lots of green growing things, corn, cornball people, and plenty of pretty powerful pig poo.  It’s the kind of place that’s so sleepy and quiet that you either have to develop a powerful imagination or go mildly insane.

So, those are the terrifying and traumatizing reasons why I just had to inflict my novel upon the world.  I hope people will find it funny and laugh a little, rather than dropping the book at their feet and then running away screaming.

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