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.
Catch a Falling Star 