Blogging A to Z challenge (2013) – Page 3 – One Thousand And One Parsecs

I is for Interstellar

Right after I went through my Dinosaur phase, I saw Star Wars IV: A New Hope for the first time. Instantly, all that childlike excitement and exuberance was transferred from paleontology to astronomy. We had a series of about twenty astronomy books in my elementary school’s LRC (Asimov’s astronomy series, I believe–the ones with the gray dust jackets), and in about a year I’d read them all.

Star Wars was fun, but what was really fascinating was learning about the stars. When I started to grasp the scale of our galaxy–that if our solar system was the size of a milk carton, the Milky Way would be the size of North America–my mind was totally blown. Quasars, pulsars, black holes, white dwarfs, red giants–it was so amazing! And then, when I started thinking about all the other worlds out there, and what it would be like to visit them–that’s when I became a science fiction fan for life.

It goes without saying that you can’t have space opera without setting the story somewhere in space. But the best space opera goes much further than that–it’s about space as the final frontier, and humanity’s ultimate destiny among the stars. After all, if we as a species stay put on this pale blue dot, sooner or later we’ll kill ourselves off or suffer another mass extinction event that wipes us all out like the Dinosaurs.

For that reason, classic space opera often takes undertones of manifest destiny, except on a galactic scale. The stars are not just interesting places to visit, they’re absolutely crucial to our survival, and no matter what alien dangers await us, we will face them boldly and either conquer or be conquered.

Of course, not all space opera stories take place during the exploration and colonization phase of human interstellar expansion. Plenty of stories take place thousands of years later, once humanity has comfortably established itself among the stars. Even so, there are still more than enough wonders remaining to be explored–if not for the characters, then for the readership. The vastness of space is so great that there really is no end to it, and the possibilities are only bounded by the writer’s imagination.

One of my favorite space opera computer games is Star Control II, also know as the Ur-Quan Masters. In the game, you’re the captain of a giant starship built with alien precursor technology. The races of the Federation, including humanity, have been defeated and enslaved by an aggressive warrior race known as the Ur-Quan. You must travel from star to star, gathering resources to upgrade your starship and convincing the other alien races to join the new alliance.

By far, the best part about that game is the starmap. It’s HUGE! More worlds than anyone can possibly visit in any one playthrough, or five, or even ten. And each alien race has its own history, its own culture, its own set of goals and objectives–and oftentimes, most of these goals have very little to do with the actual conflict of the game. In fact, there are some races like the Arilou which don’t even seem to know that there’s a war going on. They’re much more interested in something frightening and mysterious from another dimension that they never quite explained, but that may involve the Orz somehow…

With each new world that you discover, you learn that the galaxy has a very, very, very long history. So long, in fact, that the human race has only really existed for a blip in time. The other races are involved in their own disputes, and many of these go back to the times when our ancestors were swinging through the trees somewhere in central Africa. But whether or not we want to be a part of it, we’re involved, simply by virtue of where our star happens to be located.

The best space opera isn’t just about our world: it’s about our place in a much wider universe. Whether it’s a serious tale about humanity’s ultimate destiny, or an action-packed intergalactic romp, there’s always that sense of something greater than us–that same sense of wonder that gripped me as a boy when I first started to learn about the stars.

Image by nyrath at Project Rho. I highly recommend checking out his excellent starmaps!

H is for Hologram

In real life, the term “hologram” means something fairly specific. But in science fiction, it can mean a number of different things.

For example, in Star Wars it’s basically a three dimensional video recording projected on a flat surface. In Halo, it’s the visual form that the AI character Cortana takes when she wants to interact with the Master Chief. And in Star Trek, the holograms actually have a degree of physical substance, so that in some episodes they go rogue and try to take over the ship.

The basic underlying idea, though, is the same: blurring the line between the virtual world and the real world through a virtual projection that we can interact with. And in that sense, this is actually an area where science fact is fast catching up with science fiction.

Some sub-genres, such as cyberpunk, focus almost solely on the tension between the real and the virtual. Often set in a near-future world, cyberpunk stories often feature a crapsack future, from which the only meaningful escape is a virtual reality. But the thing about virtual realities is that they can be reprogrammed in such a way as to give the ones controlling it almost absolute power over the lives of the people inside. For that reason, the main characters are often hackers, struggling against the corporate evil overlords.

But holograms aren’t restricted to cyberpunk. They’re quite common in space opera, too, and not just because they’re cool. For one thing, they can be really useful for training simulations (which often leads to holodeck malfunctions, courtesy of the rule of drama). They can also be useful as disguises or decoys, especially in the Halo series.

But perhaps the most memorable holograms are the ones who develop a close relationship with their real-world human counterparts. This may include romance, which, combined with the existential angst that typically surrounds androids, robots, and cyborgs, makes for some very interesting tension. A good example of this is Cortana from the Halo series, an alien AI who took on a younger form of her human handler, Doctor Halsey, and then developed a very close relationship with her Spartan bodyguard, the Master Chief. It never actually went anywhere (at least in the main series arc), but it certainly made for an interesting story.

Jane from the Ender’s Game series would probably be my favorite hologram, though she’s more of a shapeshifting AI who can take many different forms, depending on what suits her. Cortana is definitely up there too. I haven’t used this trope much in my own fiction yet, but I’m playing with it in Heart of the Nebula, a currently unpublished direct sequel to Bringing Stella Home. Not sure exactly where I want to take it yet, but it should be interesting.

G is for Gravity

cmdr_hadfield_juggling — Commander Hadfield planning a zero-g easter egg hunt earlier this month on the ISS.

Possibly one of the most defining aspects of space is the sensation of free fall. Of course, gravity exists in space, the same as it does everywhere else in the universe (probably), but in space we feel its effects differently because we aren’t close enough to a body of sufficient mass to feel a strong pull. That, and our spaceship itself is also in free fall, so if that’s our frame of reference we feel no weight because there’s nothing for weight to push back on … but that’s a concept probably best left for O is for Orbit.

The thing is, as fun as weightlessness can be, in the long-term it can have some negative health effects, such as deterioration of bone and muscles, weakening of the immune system, etc. The effects of micro gravity on human fertility are not very well-studied, but there’s some speculation that conception and gestation would be impossible, since embryos need gravity in order to implant properly. Humans are adapted to live on the surface of Earth, and that means living with a constant 10 m/s² or so of gravitational acceleration.

For future space colonies and spacefaring civilizations, this means we need to find a way to simulate the effects of gravity in a micro-gravity environment. There are a few common ways to deal with this problem:

Artificial Gravity — Applied phlebotinum that creates a field within which the gravity is normal. A necessary weasel hand wave that you’ll see most often in soft sci-fi and space opera, where the plot and characters are more important than the science.
Centrifugal Gravity — The illusion of gravity created by spinning a can-like spaceship or space station in a circle, pressing the humans against the inside wall. You’ll see this in both hard and soft sci-fi. Scale it up, and you get Ringworld Planets.
Powerful Starship Drive — If your starship drive is powerful enough, it can accelerate you at 10 m/s², effectively creating the sensation of gravity. Your starship will be like a flying skyscraper, where “down” is in the direction of the engines. At this rate of acceleration, you should reach 99.9% the speed of light in about a year, which opens up all sorts of possibilities for relativistic space travel (provided you have a sufficiently massive energy source to sustain that reaction). Just be sure to give yourself the same amount of time to decelerate, otherwise bad things may happen.
Baby Planet — An asteroid no larger than a small asteroid that still, for some reason, has normal Earth-like gravity. Think Le Petit Prince. Not nearly as common as the other three, but the existence of gravitational waves means that it may be possible (or at least plausible) to create gravity generators that work this way.
Roll with it — Yeah, so everything is weightless in space. So what? Deal.

Another problem related to gravity is rapid deceleration. Unless you don’t mind splattering everyone in your starship all over the walls and ceilings, you can’t go from zero to near-light speeds (or vice versa) without some way to counteract the sharp change in momentum. Space opera and soft sci-fi gets around this by using inertial dampers–basically, magical devices that give the starship a nice, soft ride (unless you want the bridge to explode, of course). As you might expect, stories on the harder side of sci-fi tend to play around with this a lot more.

My first exposure to artificial gravity came when I read a comic book version of The Norby Chronicles by Isaac Asimov. The characters had a device that would basically allow them to levitate, and I thought that was so cool. It wasn’t until I read the Corellia Trilogy by Roger Allen McBride that I realized that every starship in the Star Wars universe had a machine that could manipulate gravity like this. At one point, the artificial gravity generators on one of the ships failed. My mind was blown, and I’ve never looked at gravity the same since.

I tend to write stories where the characters and plot are more central than the science, so I’ll often just fall back on the standard artificial gravity field like most space opera. During combat maneuvers, though, things get a bit more tricky, with dampers on the bridge that mitigate (but don’t erase) the worst effects of rapid deceleration, and special coffin-like chambers for the crew below decks to keep them from getting splattered. In my Star Wanderers series, I also use centrifugal gravity for the larger space stations, since I figure the energy costs of artificial gravity tend to scale up.

In short, science fiction stories that address the problem of gravity in a real and thoughtful way tend to be a lot more believable and immersive, even if the solution to the problem is basically magic. As with anything in science fiction, there are so many imaginative ways of dealing with the problem that it’s actually more of an opportunity than anything else.

F is for Faster Than Light

Remember that moment in Star Wars when the Millennium Falcon went into hyperspace? When Harrison Ford shouted “go strap yourselves in, I’m going to make the jump to light speed,” and the sky lit up as the stars streaked by? That was my first introduction to faster-than-light (FTL) travel, and I haven’t looked back since.

FTL is a major recurring trope in space opera, and not just because of how cool it is. If you’re going to have a galactic empire, you need some way to get around that empire–or at least some way to transmit information without too much difficulty. The distance between star systems is measured not in miles or kilometers, but light years–that is, the distance that a particle of light can travel in one year. Considering how the nearest star to Earth, Proxima Centauri, is ~4.24 ly away, you can see the need for some sort of magical technology to bridge the distance.

FTL travel comes in four basic flavors:

Warp Drives — The ship breaks the speed of light as easily as our modern fighter jets break the speed of sound. Impossible to justify, except through hand-waving. The most prominent example of this is Star Trek.
Jump Drives — The ship disappears from its current position and reappears somewhere else. Also requires hand-waving, but is at least a little easier to justify. Battlestar Galactica is a good example of this, as is Schlock Mercenary.
Hyperspace Drives — The ship enters an alternate dimension which allows it to travel faster through our own. The alternate dimension is called ____space, usually “hyper” but also “quasi,” “x,” etc. Star Wars is the classic example, though Star Control II took things a step further by having a hyperspace dimension within hyperspace.
Wormgate Network — The ship (or maybe just the passengers) enters a portal which transports it to a portal somewhere else. A network of these portals allows travel throughout the galaxy. Stargate and Babylon 5 use this method.

An alternate way to do it is to make FTL travel impossible, but hold the galactic empire together through FTL communication. This technology, known as the ansible, features prominently in Ursula K. Le Guin’s books and the Ender’s Game universe. It has some really interesting implications: for example, even though planets can communicate instantaneously with each other, it takes almost 40 or 50 years to go from one to another, but at near-light speeds, it feels as if only a few months have gone by. Thus, if you’re going to travel to another world, you have to leave everything behind, including your family and loved ones. By traveling from world to world, you can skip entire generations, spreading your natural lifespan across thousands of years of normal time.

In writing FTL, one thing you have to be really careful about is to keep in mind ways in which the system can be abused. For example, if jump drive technology makes it possible to instantaneously transport anything anywhere in the universe, then you can bet that someone is going to send a bomb into the White House (or whatever the equivalent is in your fictional universe). Thus, the invention of unrestricted jump drive technology will lead to a very short and brutal war.

This actually happened in Schlock Mercenary, and the solution was Terraport Area Denial (TAD) zones, or broad areas of space where a force field prevents anyone from either jumping in or out. Thus, anyone who wants to visit a planet in a TAD zone has to jump to the edge of the field and travel the rest of the way at sublight speeds.

FTL isn’t always appropriate for a science fiction story. If the story is supposed to lean more toward hard sf, then it’s probably better to stick with our current understanding of the rules of physics, which state that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. Still, with things like quantum entanglement and other recent discoveries, if you know the science well enough, even the speed of light might not be an upper limit. But for the rest of us mortals, FTL is basically just magic–a sufficiently explained magic, perhaps, but magic nonetheless.

Personally, I’m a fan of the jump drive form of FTL. That’s the one I use the most in my own books. The cost is that the further distance you try to jump, the harder it is to pinpoint exactly where you’ll end up. To overcome this, you can use jump beacons to draw out anyone trying to jump into your particular sector and have them exit jumpspace next to the beacon. This comes in handy in combat, when the enemy tries to jump a nuke onto your ship.

In the later Gaia Nova books, FTL is facilitated by jump stations spread out in a line across space, with reactors powerful enough to jump ships rapidly to the next point along the line. In the earlier Star Wanderers books, that technology hasn’t been invented yet, so there’s still an Outworld frontier.

It gets kind of complicated, but it’s lots and lots of fun to world build. For example, how does a particular change in the FTL tech alter the galactic balance of power? When settlers try to colonize a new system, what do they establish first–starlanes, jump beacons, Lagrange outposts, or what? As with any magic, changing one thing affects everything else, which also affects everything else, which … yeah, you get the picture.

E is for Empire

Almost every far future science fiction story has a galactic empire of some kind. From Dune to Foundation, from Star Wars to Firefly, there’s always someone trying to rule the galaxy, often in a way that makes life difficult for the protagonists.

Why? Rule of drama, of course, but also because it gives the story a truly epic scope. Just as the classics such as Homer’s Iliad and Tolstoy’s War and Peace are as much about entire civilizations as they are about the people characters within them, so it is with science fiction, especially space opera. Combine that with science fiction’s forward-thinking nature, and you have the potential for some truly amazing stories about humanity’s destiny among the stars.

But why empire? Because even if we make it out to the stars, we’ll probably still take with us all of the baggage that makes us human. Science fiction may be forward looking, but history repeats itself, and you can’t have a clear view of the future without understanding and acknowledging the past.

Not all galactic empires are evil, but most of them are. We shouldn’t have to look further than the real-world history of Imperialism to see why. Oppression, exploitation, slavery, genocide–all of these have been done in the name of Empire, and many more evils besides. Even benevolent hegemonic powers (such as, I would argue, the United States of America) often end up doing great harm, either through action or inaction.

Of course, all of this makes for some really great stories. When Asimov wrote his Foundation series, he quite literally based it on The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon. When Frank Herbert wrote Dune, he drew extensively from his background as an orientalist and based the overworld story on the Muslim conquests of the 7th and 8th centuries. Star Wars is based loosely on the collapse of the Roman Republic, and Firefly echoes many of the old Western tales of former Confederate soldiers heading west after the US Civil War.

It’s worth pointing out that the Galactic Empire is by no means the only form of political organization in space opera. There are actually several, including:

The Federation — A loose organization of stars and planets that usually exists to foster cooperation and mutual peace between galactic civilizations. Rarely evil, but can be crippled by red tape.
The Republic — A more centralized version of the Federation, typically. Exercises more control over its citizens, but not in an oppressive way. Usually features some form of representative government.
The Alliance — A team of political underdogs united to overthrow the Empire and establish a more just form of government in its place. If they win, they usually become the Republic or the Federation.
The Kingdom — A smaller government within the larger political system, often struggling for survival against more powerful forces. Not always democratic, but is often good, at least to its own citizens.
The Hegemonic Empire — Like the Empire, but rules primarily through soft power, ie co-opting their enemies rather than crushing them. May overlap with the Republic or the Federation.
The People’s Republic of Tyranny — The Empire pretending to be the Federation.
The Vestigial Empire — What the Empire becomes when it’s been defeated but not yet destroyed. Still oppressive and evil, but rules a smaller territory and struggles for relevance and survival.
The Remnant — An element from the Alliance that’s gone rogue. The war may be over, but these guys are still fighting it, even if they’ve lost sight of what they’re fighting for.
The Horde — A highly aggressive and expansionist warlord state. By far the most violent and brutal of any political organization, it seeks to conquer and subjugate the entire galaxy.

As a political science major, all these forms of government really fascinate me. I’ve played with quite a few of them, especially the Horde (Bringing Stella Home), the Empire (Desert Stars), the Hegemonic Empire (Star Wanderers), the Kingdom (Stars of Blood and Glory), and the Remnant (also Stars of Blood and Glory). You can definitely expect to see me play with them again in the future.

D is for Droids

Some of the best-loved characters in science fiction don’t even have a heartbeat. Why? They’re robots, that’s why!

Unlike the mechanical “slaves” (the original meaning of the Czech root robota) that built your car or enable your GPS devices, these robots are a lot more human. In fact, the word “droid” is short for “android,” which comes from the Greek root for “man” (andr-) and means “manlike.”

In other words, the thing that defines these robots is that they blur the line between machine and man. And ever since they made their first appearance in some of the earliest works of science fiction (Frankenstein by Mary Shelley was arguably the first), that’s exactly what they’ve been doing.

Star Trek loves to play with this trope, from Data in The Next Generation to the doctor in Voyager. But where the droids in Star Trek tend to be angsty and existential, the ones who populate Star Wars already know their place and don’t have any qualms filling it.

My first exposure to droids was when I saw the original Star Wars trilogy as a little boy. An image of C3PO with his golden humanoid body wandering across the dune wastes of Tatooine will probably be stamped on my subconscious forever. That, and the little traveling flea market the Jawas ran from their sand crawler.

One of the neat things about droids is that you can go either direction with them. If you want to get all existential about the nature of humanity and whatnot, you can use them to explore those questions since they’re almost human but not quite. On the other hand, if you just want an exciting space romp with some unique and interesting characters, you can bring them out as regular characters.

An advantage that droids have over humans is that they’re harder to kill and easier to bring back to life. Star Wars leaned on this a lot, especially in episodes IV and V. When R2D2 got shot in the battle of Yavin IV, right before Luke blew up the Death Star, I just about died. And yet, they brought him back easily enough for the throne room scene because he’s a robot–all they had to say was “we’ll fix him up” and you knew that everything would be better.

So yeah, droids. I haven’t done much with droids yet in my own writing, mostly because I’m a bit conflicted in my thoughts about the upper limits of AI (which I explored somewhat in Genesis Earth). Most of my robots are actually cyborgs, and that’s something completely different. Still, I can see myself playing with this trope at some point in the future, probably when/if I introduce some aliens or start a new series.

C is for Cryo

I think every science fiction writer has a cryo (aka “human popsicle“) story sitting around somewhere, even if it’s just in the back of their head. It’s one of those tropes that keeps coming back, just like the alien invasion, the robot apocalypse, and the Adam and Eve plot.

The basic concept is pretty simple, even if the technology is a bit more complex: a human or animal undergoes rapid freezing in order to put themselves into stasis for an extended period of time. Months, years, or even centuries later, someone thaws and resuscitates them so that they wake up in a completely different time and place.

There are a lot of good reasons why going into cryo makes sense in a science fiction universe. One of the more common ones is that the characters are colonists on a mission to an alien star, and their spaceship doesn’t have a faster-than-light drive. Rather than go through all the trouble of building a generation ship, the designers instead built a series of cryo chambers to put the colonists into stasis for an extended period of time. It might take centuries or millennia for the ship to reach its destination, but when it does, the colonists wake up as if it’s just been a long, dreamless night.

In The Worthing Saga, Orson Scott Card has a somewhat unusual rationale behind the prevalence of cryo in his universe (though they call it “hot sleep,” and it’s induced by a drug called soma). Only the rich can afford the technology, and the imperial overlords very carefully regulate the use of it so that there’s a clear hierarchy based on who goes under for the longest amount at a time. It’s a way for the citizens to achieve a simulated form of immortality, by skipping five or ten years every year or two of their lives.

In the Halo video game series, the UNSC uses cryo as a way to preserve their greatest military assets, the Spartans, for the times when they’re needed. The first game in the series starts when John-117, aka the Master Chief, is awakened just as the starship Pillar of Autumn crash lands on a mysterious alien structure. Like something from an old Norse legend, the third game ends when the Master Chief seals himself into the cryo chamber of a derelict starship, telling the AI Cortana “wake me when you need me.” (highlight to view spoilers).

So why are cryo stories so prevalent in science fiction? For one thing, they’ve been floating around in our cultural subconscious a lot longer than the genre has been in existence–just think of Sleeping Beauty or Rip Van Winkle. For another thing, the science is not that far-fetched. Certain animals can be revived after extended periods of frozen stasis, and according to the New York Times, it’s happened at least once with a human being. Science fiction has a long history of turning fiction into fact (for example, Arthur C. Clarke and communication satellites), so perhaps it’s only a matter of time before human cryotech becomes a reality.

I’m definitely a fan of this trope in my own writing. Genesis Earth has a chapter with a rather horrific cryothaw scene, which I later spun off into a short piece titled “From the Ice Incarnate.” I haven’t played with it much in my latest books, but in Heart of the Nebula which I hope to publish later this year, the cryotech plays a very important role in the plot. And if I ever write a prequel to my Gaia Nova series showing how that universe got started, it will feature a cryo colonization story. The main premise of that series is that a group of human colonists fled 21st century Earth and went into cryo to colonize a distant corner of the galaxy, but when they woke up, they couldn’t find Earth anymore, so it became something of an ancient holy legend (which is a major driver for Desert Stars).

B is for Space Battles

osc_first_meetings If you fell in love with science fiction when you were twelve, chances were it was because of the awesome space battles. That was certainly the case with me. When I saw Star Wars for the first time, I spent hours running around the house pretending I was flying my own starfighter. In some ways, I’ve never really stopped. 😛

Ever since space opera became its own subgenre, space warfare has featured prominently in it, probably for the same reasons that Homer and Tolstoy framed their sprawling epics with a tale of war. Where else are you going to find enough drama to fill volumes? The fact that it’s set in space makes it so much cooler.

There are a lot of things about the space setting that make war stories different from those set here on Earth. For one thing, there’s a huge element of exploration and unknown. Even before we took the first photographs of Earth from space, there pretty much isn’t any corner on this planet that hasn’t been discovered by somebody. In space, though, it’s still possible to stumble on a hidden planet, or find a mysterious alien artifact that can turn the tide of the war (Halo, anyone?).

For another thing, the dynamics of battle are completely different. Sure, some stories treat space like an ocean, and there’s certainly a place for that kind of story, but the more interesting ones (at least to me) take into account all the profound differences. For one thing, the zero gravity means that there is no “up” or “down,” which means that you have to deal with the possibility of attack coming from any direction, not just along a horizontal plane. That concept alone drives the battles in Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game series, where “the enemy’s gate is down.”

One thing that really tickles me is when the story takes things a step further and incorporates things like orbital mechanics and delta-v. I haven’t seen many books or games that do this, but the ones that do have really engrossed me by making the world feel that much more real. Glen Cook did it in Passage At Arms, and the new Battlestar Galactica did it in the viper dogfights (though I’m not sure if they did it on the ship-to-ship scale).

The implications of real-world space physics on warfare are quite fascinating. Rocketpunk Manifesto is an excellent blog that’s almost entirely dedicated to exploring them all, with all sorts of fascinating discussions on what the “plausible mid-future” may look like. But even if all you’re looking for is an entertaining romp through space, the story telling possibilities are so much greater when you take the constraints of physics into account.

For example, if it takes months or even years to travel between planets, and orbital trajectories are fairly straightforward to figure out, how does it affect things if you can see the enemy fleet coming at your planet that long in advance? If escape velocity from a gravity well like Earth is so difficult to achieve, what does that mean about the possibility of long-term planetary sieges? And if starships are so far apart and moving so fast as to make full-on broadsides unlikely, how does that shape the battle tactics and strategy? In spite of the physical constraints (or indeed, perhaps because of them), the possibilities are endless.

Man, I love me some good space battles. One of my recent sci-fi favorites that features some epic battles is Wolfhound by my friend Kindal Debenham. In my own work, you’ll find lots of them, especially in the Gaia Nova series (Bringing Stella Home, Stars of Blood and Glory, and to a lesser extent Desert Stars). They say that the golden age for science fiction is about twelve years old, and that’s definitely true for me. Expect to see lots more space battles from me in the future.

A is for Aliens

Alien races–what would science fiction be without them? They’re as fundamental to the genre as elves and dwarves are to fantasy. If you’re reading a book and an alien being from another planet shows up on the page, that in itself is usually enough to make the story science fiction.

My first exposure to aliens came from Star Wars IV: A New Hope, which I saw as a kid sometime back in the early nineties. The cantina scene with the weird, catchy music and all the frighteningly creatures both scared and fascinated me. Here were a bunch of humans, mingling with these things that looked like monsters as if nothing were strange or unusual. In fact, it soon became clear that these weren’t monsters at all, but regular people–that is, as regular as you can be without being human.

I think the main reason for including aliens in a space opera story is that it makes the setting feel more exotic and otherworldly. It can also add all sorts of interesting possibilities for plot and character, depending on the different capabilities of the various alien races and the way their culture shapes them. Babylon 5 is a great example of this, with the characters from each alien race interacting with each other in ways unique to their various cultures.

One way to think of science fictional aliens is to put them on a spectrum with two extremes. On the one side, you have the more familiar aliens–the races from Star Trek, for example, which are basically human-like except with weird skin or bone ridges to physically distinguish them. On the other side, you have the truly bizarre–the kinds of aliens that are so different from us, we cannot possibly conceive their thoughts or the way they see the world.

The main advantage of the more familiar alien types is that they’re easy to understand and relate to. Yeah, they may look weird, but they don’t think or act much differently than the Russians, or the Arabs, or whatever human culture they roughly parallel. In fact, it’s not uncommon in fiction of this type for the aliens to be less “alien” than the Japanese (at least, in Western fiction–obviously, it’s different in manga and anime). This, in turn, is the main weakness with aliens of this type: they are so readily understandable that it’s easy to lose that sense of otherness.

The main advantage of the more extreme kind of alien is that it can make a much stronger impact, which makes for a more compelling and thought-provoking story. For example, the Hypotheticals in Robert Charles Wilson’s Spin trilogy are so fascinating because we know so little about them. They have the power to shape entire worlds, manipulating space and time itself, and yet none of the reasons behind what they’re doing make sense–if indeed there’s any reason behind it at all. Or in Octavia Butler’s Xenogensis trilogy, it’s not too hard to figure out what the aliens are trying to do, but the way in which they do it, impregnating the main character through their tri-sexual biological capabilities makes for a profoundly disturbing story.

The disadvantage, of course, is that aliens of this kind are much more difficult for readers to relate to. If the aliens are so advanced that their thoughts transcend our own, or if their sensory organs are so different that we cannot possibly conceive of how they see the world, then it’s very difficult for us to get inside of their heads. For this reason, aliens of this kind tend to become more of a force of nature than actual characters–or characters in the aggregate, in the way that humanity is the main character of most of Arthur C. Clarke’s books.

Personally, I’m more of a fan of the extreme alien type. The universe is so vast, and our understanding of it is so lacking, that it rings a lot truer to me. The odds that we are alone in the universe are so infinitesimally small that refusing to believe in the existence of aliens would be akin to believing in 1492 that the Earth is flat, and yet if/when we ever make contact, I can’t help but wonder how different from us they’ll be. So much of what we take for granted is just a fluke of our particular circumstances here on this planet–the chance combination of so many variables that changing any one of them would completely rewrite the story of how our species evolved, much less our civilization.

There is a place for the more familiar aliens of space opera, though. They make for some very entertaining stories, provide a fun escape from this world when that’s what we need. They also give us a chance to look at ourselves through a lens that strips away our stereotypes and prejudices. We might have some very strong opinions about immigrants, for example, or people of a different race or color, but none of us are prejudiced against Sand People, or Klingons, or Androsynth. In space opera, most alien races are loosely based on real-world cultures, so it’s possible to draw parallels without all the cultural and historical baggage.

In a sense, all fiction is just the culture speaking to itself, so when we read about aliens we are really reading about ourselves. Encountering the Other in a non-threatening fictional world enables us to face the real-world Other with understanding and compassion.

I haven’t written very many alien stories yet, but I have a couple cooking in the back of my mind. Genesis Earth has an alien encounter with a bit of a twist to it, but the characters in my Star Wanderers and Gaia Nova series are all human (well, mostly). If/when I do introduce an alien race, I plan to do it right, which will almost certainly involve a first contact story. But that’s for Saturday’s blog post, not today’s.

1000 posts and counting

1000dollars — Not quite the same, but we’ll run with it anyway.

According to my WordPress dashboard, this is the 1,000th post on this blog. I was going to hold off and do something big and momentous for the occasion, but then I figured it would be better to do a quick footnote and get on with the regular program.

Nine hundred ninety nine blog posts ago, I was a college student at BYU who had just decided to write my first novel instead of a massive Final Fantasy VI fanfic. The year was 2007, I had a bunch of unfinished novels and stories left over from high school, but I’d never actually finished anything. I started this blog so that my writing friends could keep me honest.

If I could have seen myself now, I probably would have thought that I’m crazy (I think I got those verb tenses right…). Back in 2007, writing was still a hobby. I had dreams of turning it into something a little bit more, but I never intended to try and make it my full time career–though if you’d asked me what I wanted to do for a career, I couldn’t have given you an answer.

A thousand blog posts from now, where will I be? Married, probably, with a couple of kids (or at least one on the way). Hopefully by then, I’ll have turned this writing dream into a full time career–heck, I’m not all that far from making it happen right now.

The 2013 me hopes that I’ll be living somewhere exotic, having an extended overseas adventure with my lovely wife. But the truth is that I’ll probably be settled down somewhere, trying to pay off a house and raise a family the responsible way. If that’s the case, I’ll probably look back on my 2013 self and think he’s crazy.

But hey, who knows what the future will bring?

One thing that’s almost certainly true is that I’ll still be blogging. I don’t just blog to promote my books, or to build my “platform” (oh how I hate that word), or anything slimy like that. I’ve been blogging since before I decided to turn this writing thing into a career, and I keep on doing it because I love doing it. Because really, how in the heck can you get to a thousand of anything without loving it?

On that note, I should add that I’ve signed up for the Blogging from A to Z Challenge for the month of April. Every day (except Sundays), I’ll do a post that starts with a different letter of the alphabet, starting at A and going down to Z. My theme is going to be things I love about science fiction and fantasy, and it’s going to include a number of common tropes. It’s going to be fun!

So yeah, here’s to the first thousand posts on this blog. It certainly won’t be the last! 🙂