A little something for the weekend?

Recommended Watching

Free Guy

Some people just can’t stand Ryan Reynolds. If you are one of those people, give this one a miss, as this movie features Ryan Reynolds at his Ryan Reynoldsiest.

If that prospect doesn’t bother you… 

Free Guy is a hoot, and a lot of fun.

In this movie Reynolds plays “Guy,” a man whose life is so boring, repetitious, and inconsequential that he doesn’t even realize he doesn’t have a last name—until the day he wakes up, and realizes he’s just an NPC in someone else’s MMRPG.

Then he decides to try deviating from his script, just to see if he can make a difference.

I don’t want to say too much about this one, except to say that it’s smart, funny, and full of surprises. I like to think it’s the sort of story Philip K. Dick might have written if he was still alive today—and if he wasn’t a paranoid schizophrenic, and wasn’t loaded to the gills on anti-psychotic meds, and was much better at writing comedy than he really was, and in short, was more like the person I wish he’d been in real life and not like the sad mess he actually was. Never mind. Forget the analogy.

There is an inner plot—about Guy discovering who he is, the truth about the world he lives in, and the real reason for and purpose of his life—encased in an outer plot, about the usual stolen code and evil megacorporation and rich megalomaniac fashion victim übervillain and all that sort of thing. The outer plot isn’t particularly groundbreaking in any way, but it is necessary in order to add extra meaning and urgency to the inner plot. By the end of this movie you will actually care about the characters in this story, the NPCs even more so than the “real” people, and the ending is very positive and uplifting.

Which makes it all the more puzzling to me, then, that the screenplay for this one was co-authored by the same yutz who co-authored the second movie on today’s double-feature—but more about that in a minute.

Recommendation: Make a big bowl of popcorn, kick back, and enjoy this one!

_____________________

Recommended Missing 

Ready Player One

 

My momma always told me, “If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.”

Must. Bite. Tongue…

Sorry mom, I can’t do it. Maybe someone else can find something positive to say about this one, but for me, this movie manages to combine everything I find irritating about Steven Spielberg at his smug, smarmy. self-indulgent and self-referential worst with everything I absolutely hate about contemporary formulaic, derivative, paint-by-numbers “cyberpunk” fiction, all rolled up into one great big incoherent steaming turd of a movie. There is such a thing as homage, and it can be quite good. This isn’t an homage, though, it’s a flash mob storming through the 1980s and stealing everything that isn’t nailed down.

The fact that this movie made a half-billion dollars irks me.

The fact that the novel this movie was based on was a New York Times bestseller infuriates me.

The fact that the sequel, Ready Player Two, debuted as the #1 bestseller on the New York Times list and the film is already in development renders me nearly speechless. If the Russians were to wipe us out in a nuclear war next week and thus prevent the sequel movie from being completed and released, they would be doing the world a favor. 

Maybe someone else can find something positive to say about this one. I can’t.

Recommendation: If your only choice is between watching this one or gouging your own eyes out, say goodbye to your eyes and start gouging.

Let's talk about Newsletters

One of the secrets to building readership, I’ve been told time and time again in marketing workshops and webinars, is to build a mailing list and then to send out a newsletter weekly, or at least monthly.

I don’t know about this. I’d always thought the secret was to write great fiction and then put it out where people can read it. Our sales numbers suggest that I am dead wrong on this point, though, we let’s talk this week about author’s and publisher’s newsletters. 

Some questions:

• If you’re an author, do you publish a newsletter? If so, how often, and can you send me a copy?

• If you’re a reader, do you subscribe to any author’s or publisher’s newsletters? Who has a really good one that you’d recommend subscribing to?

• A weekly newsletter seems like overkill to me. What do you think? Too frequent?

• Perhaps I’m reading too much into this, having been the newsletter editor for a couple of different non-profit organizations with thousands of members where the monthly newsletter was always a big deal. (And where the member behavior suggested that 90% of them threw it straight in the trash without reading it.) Assuming we could produce such a thing, does anyone have the time to read complex newsletters anymore?

• If you subscribe to newsletters, in what format do you prefer to receive them? Me, I would prefer to keep things as simple and clean as possible, and I absolutely will not click on an email link that sends me off to retrieve a file from “the cloud.” I’m even leery of opening unsolicited PDF files these days. What’s been your experience?

Thanks,
Bruce Bethke

 

Creating Alien Aliens, Part 11: Invading Aliens (Dos)

Five decades ago, I started my college career with the intent of becoming a marine biologist. I found out I had to get a BS in biology before I could even begin work on MARINE biology; especially because there WEREN'T any marine biology programs in Minnesota.

Along the way, the science fiction stories I'd been writing since I was 13 began to grow more believable. With my BS in biology and a fascination with genetics, I started to use more science in my fiction.

After reading hard SF for the past 50 years, and writing hard SF successfully for the past 20, I've started to dig deeper into what it takes to create realistic alien life forms. In the following series, I'll be sharing some of what I've learned. I've had some of those stories published, some not...I teach a class to GT young people every summer called ALIEN WORLDS. I've learned a lot preparing for that class for the past 25 years...so...I have the opportunity to share with you what I've learned thus far. Take what you can use, leave the rest. Let me know what YOU'VE learned. Without further ado...

What, exactly, constitutes an “invasion”?

Sometimes it’s obvious: D-Day, the Invasion of Normandy is obvious, at least on the surface.

Would anyone here consider COVID-19 an invasion of billions of sovereign Human Bodies?

How about the European occupation of the continent named after someone who “discovered” something that was already there and had populations with cultures and technologies and writing and education and art and medicine?

Did THE ANDROMEDA STRAIN invade a tiny Arizona town in a novel that debuted Michael Crichton’s real name for the first time?

If you’ve ever gotten cholecystitis, bacteremia, cholangitis, a urinary tract infection, traveler's diarrhea, had a child who had neonatal meningitis, or pneumonia was your body invaded by the Escherichia coli of another person?

Do you have mitochondria? Did they invade your proto-eukaryotic Human cells? (The answer appears to be “likely, yes” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondrion#Origin_and_evolution)

Who “gave you” your cold last time? Did they really “give it to you” or were you invaded by a virus that used them as a biological Higgins Boat?

What is “invasion” then?

Did the aliens in “Independence Day” actually invade Earth? No. They didn’t necessarily consider it an invasion. They needed resources; Earth couldn’t protect them (ie, we “didn’t exist”), so they arrived to take them. They followed the supposed dictum of Charles Darwin, or, the “survival of the fittest”. The term made famous in the fifth edition of On the Origin of Species by British naturalist Charles Darwin, which suggested that organisms best adjusted to their environment are the most successful in surviving and reproducing. Darwin borrowed the term from English sociologist and philosopher Herbert Spencer, who first used it in his 1864 book Principles of Biology. (Spencer came up with the phrase only after reading Darwin’s work.)”

In the old film, “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” wasn’t an invasion at all – it was a space-borne intelligence that drifted through space in a spore until it found a planet. “The film's storyline concerns…alien plant spores [that] have fallen from space and grown into large seed pods, each one capable of producing a visually identical replacement copy of a human [that] assimilates the physical traits, memories, and personalities of each sleeping person placed near it [who] are devoid of all human emotion.” Is THIS an invasion?

It appears that an invasion is only an invasion if someone survives it and names it as such. Naming something is important – who names it, less so. Madeleine L’Engle had a character say in her book, A WIND IN THE DOOR, “I think your mythology would call them fallen angels. War and hate are their business, and one of their chief weapons is un-Naming - making people not know who they are. If someone knows who he is, really knows, then he doesn't need to hate. That's why we still need Namers…When everyone is really and truly Named, then the Echthroi will be vanquished.”

How do we define invasion, then? “an instance of invading a country or region with an armed force”; “an incursion by a large number of people or things into a place or sphere of activity”; “an unwelcome intrusion into another's domain”.

Science fiction writers usually look at “alien invasion” strictly from the Human side – which precedent was originated by HG Wells’ WAR OF THE WORLDS. But there aren’t many attempts to look at the invasion from the other side – what would motivate aliens to invade Earth.

By definition, though, aliens would have alien reasons for invading Earth. Maybe trying to take our water from us makes sense to THEM, even though the possibility of manufacturing water on their home world would be incredibly simple.

Not only that, what would the aliens think of the invasion? Would they object? Would they be fine with it – as the European/American sense of Manifest Destiny allowed them to be ask they took whatever they saw in the New World?

Objection or Manifest Destiny – are there any other ways aliens would respond?

To answer the question, I would have to create an alien from their DNA outward. Can I do that? I’m not sure. But, I’m willing to try.

How about you?

Footnote: Perhaps the most realistic aliens I’ve ever seen in a MOVIE, are the Heptapods in “Arrival”. They are incomprehensible at first; and even when the scientists DO get what they’re saying, their perception of time is incomprehensible. The entire movie is difficult – from learning to understand…well, as I was about to make a list of what the Humans in the movie understand about the Heptapods, I realized that we didn’t understand ANYTHING. They are entirely alien. If it weren’t for the main character, Louise Banks explaining everything, by the end of the movie, we STILL wouldn’t have any idea of what happened.

Did the Heptapods invade Earth? Hmmm...Study the movie, invert everything we learn and maybe we can create alien aliens…

Reading of Interest: https://slate.com/culture/2021/10/invasion-apple-tv-tomorrow-war-watchmen-aliens-racism.html, https://www.livescience.com/alien-discoveries-2021
Image: https://image.shutterstock.com/image-illustration/alien-human-600w-136457129.jpg

Guy Stewart is a husband supporting his wife who is a multi-year breast cancer survivor; a father, father-in-law, grandfather, foster father, friend, writer, and recently retired teacher and school counselor who maintains a writing blog by the name of POSSIBLY IRRITATING ESSAYS (https://faithandsciencefiction.blogspot.com/) where he showcases his opinion and offers his writing up for comment. He has 72 stories, articles, reviews, and one musical script to his credit, and the list still includes one book! He also maintains GUY'S GOTTA TALK ABOUT BREAST CANCER & ALZHEIMER'S, where he shares his thoughts and translates research papers into everyday language. In his spare time, he herds cats and a rescued dog, helps keep a house, and loves to bike, walk, and camp. He thinks out loud in print at: https://faithandsciencefiction.blogspot.com/

Sunday • 23 January 2022

 

A very long time ago, back at the beginning of the First Social Media Age, when “blogging” was a thing that was fresh and new and I was running a site called The Ranting Room—which begat The Friday Challenge, which begat Stupefying Stories—I took a vow that Sundays belonged to my family.

That vow went by the wayside a long time ago, but it’s time to renew it.

Those of you who have been working remotely for the past two years have come to understand the problem. When your home is your workplace, the scope creep is inescapable. Work slithers in and wraps its tentacles around everything you do, all the time. You’re always finding an excuse to duck down to your office or wake up your laptop to do just “one more” thing, to jot down one more idea, or to answer one more email. As the technology has advanced it’s only gotten worse. Now even my phone hectors me constantly, demanding that I respond to this or that message now, now, NOW! 

No. Enough. I recognize an addiction when I see one, and this, my friends, has become an addiction.

It’s Sunday. The computers are off. I’m not checking email or social media today. This day belongs to my family. I wrote this post last Friday and scheduled it to go live today. See you on Monday. 

~brb

A little something for the weekend?

Recommended Watching

Ghostbusters: Afterlife

I’ll make this simple. If you are at all a fan of the original 1984 Ghostbusters, watch this one. After a troubled development history and a release schedule frequently delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic, it finally appeared in theaters last November, to mixed reviews and strong but not overwhelming ticket sales.

Never mind that. It’s out on streaming media now, with the DVD and Blu-Ray versions scheduled to roll out on February 1, supply chain willing, so you have no more excuses.

See this one.

It’s that good. 

For reference, this one is a direct sequel to the 1984 original, and a direct continuation of the original story. It makes some passing reference to the events of the botched 1989 sequel, Ghostbusters II, but as for that 2016 abomination, in the universe of this story, that movie never existed. Lucky them. 

[In reluctant defense of the 2016 movie: at one time the project was in development as Ghostbusters III with the plot revolving around Dan Ackroyd training in a new generation of Ghostbusters, who were to be Chris Farley, Chris Rock, and Ben Stiller. So we can all thank Gozer we were spared that nightmare.]

Some of the trailers make it look as if Paul Rudd is the star of this movie, but that’s misleading. The unquestioned star of this movie is McKenna Grace, playing 12-year-old Phoebe, who is on a journey of discovery to find out who she is, where she came from, and where she’s going. Her story just reaches in and gets a firm grip on your heartstrings, and if you aren’t at least a little choked up by the final scene there’s something wrong with your sense of empathy. This movie has been panned by some critics for having “too much fan service,” but seriously, what’s wrong with that? This is a sequel to a beloved modern classic, and it wraps up loose ends and character arcs that have been left hanging for more than thirty years. It damn well better include plenty of fan service!

We wound up watching this one twice, because there were so many bits of business and things going on in the background that we missed the first time through. Highly recommended.

_____________________

Recommended Missing

Jonah Hex

I’m beginning to suspect that somewhere in Netflix’s algorithms there is a “taunt” parameter, and it was created by someone with a truly sadistic sense of humor. I say this because for some reason Wild Wild West has been showing up on my “Recommended for you” list a lot lately, traveling in the company of this turkey. Given that I wouldn’t get up out of puddle of cold vomit to watch Wild Wild West again—I count myself lucky to have slipped out of the regional premiere before anyone recognized me—and given that while I was never a fan of the Jonah Hex comic, we found the character of Jonah Hex as played by Johnathon Schaech in DC’s Legends of Tomorrow to be generally likable, we decided to give this one a try. I mean, hey, it stars Josh Brolin and John Malkovich. How bad can it be?

Pretty bad, it turns out.

If you are one of those people who actually liked Wild Wild West—if you wish Warner Brothers made more movies just like it—I have good news for you. They did. Unreconstructed ex-Confederate madman plotting to overthrow the government? Check. Lots of knuckling-dragging redneck mo-ron Southern stereotype minions? Check. (Plus one over-the-top homicidal Irishman.) A lot of confusion over just where exactly this story takes place? Check. Utterly insane and ludicrous “ultimate weapon” in the hands of the madman? Check. The President of the United States, with all the resources of the Federal government at his command, decides to call on just one man to save the day, and that man is a surly and uncooperative antihero? Check.

To be honest, I watched this one all the way through to the end of the credits, just because I was so certain I was going to see some familiar names from Wild Wild West pop up. But to my stunned surprise, the only familiar name that leaped off the screen at me was in the music credit: Mastadon.

Sure. What the Hell. If you’re going to make a movie that’s this big of a stupid mess, why not hire a heavy metal band to do the score?

Recommendation: Watch only if you have absolutely nothing better to do. 

A question about your home town

 

I learned something surprising this week: that filmmaker Zack Snyder (300, Man of Steel, Batman v Superman, Justice League, etc., etc., etc.) was born in Green Bay, Wisconsin.

It’s a good thing I don’t have a connection with him. I’d probably be unable to resist the temptation to ask, “So, tomorrow night: who d’ya pick, the Packers or the 49ers?” And then I’d watch his reaction very closely.

In a lifetime in the creative arts, that’s a weird but consistent thing I’ve observed. Be it music, theater, film, publishing, or whatever, and no matter where you go, the people in the creative business almost universally fall into two categories: those who still feel some fondness for the (usually small) town they originally came from, and those who loathed it and couldn’t get far enough away from it fast enough. That one factor is an amazingly accurate predictor of so many other things about their personality, attitudes, and beliefs. 

Me, I was born in Milwaukee, but grew up in a little town that’s basically at the other end of Wisconsin Highway 29 from Green Bay. I may have spent my early years in Milwaukee, but I didn’t start to grow up until I was out on my own, and no longer Ray and Charlotte’s youngest kid. So no matter where I go, a significant piece of my heart will always be in that little town.

How about you? How do you feel about the place where you grew up?

While you’re considering your answer to that question, here’s some music to ponder by.

Once more: Thanks

 

Thank you to everyone who has sent positive thoughts and encouraging words since Monday’s announcement. Your kindness and concern is appreciated. 

Thanks also to everyone who has offered up a suggestion as to how we could reboot this thing and keep Stupefying Stories going. They’re all good ideas. I appreciate your willingness to share your thoughts and creativity and to volunteer to help.

However, the hard reality remains: last July’s medical crisis was life-changing. Once things finally settled down a bit—meaning I was no longer prepping and delivering IV infusions every eight hours, around the clock, seven days a week, for months on end—and I tried to get back to work, I was baffled by why I was tired all the time and couldn’t seem to get anything finished. So I began to keep very close track of my time and how I spent it.

The results are clear. Whoever and whatever I was before last July, I am now 90% single parent and caregiver. Everything else that I used to do—everything, including Rampant Loon Press—now needs to be fit into slightly less than two and a half hours daily.

The one thing no one can give me is more time. No one, not even the Dallas Cowboys, can buy more time, not even five more seconds.

I like to imagine we’re going into some sort of chrysalis or cocoon stage, and in a few months or a year we’ll reemerge as something big, beautiful, and glorious. I have tried to walk away from the SF/F publishing business before, but don’t seem to be able to do so. Something always draws me back in. We will in all probability be back, in some new form.

But for right now, and for the immediately foreseeable future, I have no idea what that form might be or when it might happen. Hence Monday’s announcement. 

Once again, thanks for your support,
Bruce Bethke

In response to Bruce Bethke's horrific vision in response to Alien Aliens Part 11, Part 1..

 On 1/19/22...

~brb said...

There's a sci-fi horror scenario for you. A giant alien ship comes to Earth. Everyone sees it land smack in the middle of Washington DC. The Army rushes to throw a cordon around it, fighting against time. Can they contain whatever alien menace is hiding inside that unearthly ship?! The door opens... All weapons are trained... Fingers tense-up on triggers...

And then a horde of small, gray-skinned, big-eyed and big-headed social workers file out, and one steps up to the nearest TV camera crew, takes the microphone, and says these terrifying words, "We're from the Galactic Government, and we're here to help you."

JANUARY 19, 2022 AT 9:13 AM

I responded:

REBEL MOON: The Movie?!

Well, here’s something mighty peculiar. I just learned that Zack Snyder is making a movie for Netflix, and the title of it is…

REBEL MOON

IMDB doesn’t have much to say about it, aside from the fact that the plot looks like yet another retread of Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, but there seems to be a lot of chatter about it on the various SF media fanboi sites. 

I do wonder, though, if this explains why we’ve had a sudden surge of interest lately in this book. We’ve sold a lot of copies of it in the last few weeks. Someone is really going to be disappointed.

BTW, we still have a good supply of copies in stock. If you want to buy one, let me know.

~brb

Creating Alien Aliens, Part 11: Invading Aliens (Uno)

Five decades ago, I started my college career with the intent of becoming a marine biologist. I found out I had to get a BS in biology before I could even begin work on MARINE biology; especially because there WEREN'T any marine biology programs in Minnesota.

Along the way, the science fiction stories I'd been writing since I was 13 began to grow more believable. With my BS in biology and a fascination with genetics, I started to use more science in my fiction.

After reading hard SF for the past 50 years, and writing hard SF successfully for the past 20, I've started to dig deeper into what it takes to create realistic alien life forms. In the following series, I'll be sharing some of what I've learned. I've had some of those stories published, some not...I teach a class to GT young people every summer called ALIEN WORLDS. I've learned a lot preparing for that class for the past 25 years...so...I have the opportunity to share with you what I've learned thus far. Take what you can use, leave the rest. Let me know what YOU'VE learned. Without further ado...

Invading aliens have been around for a long time, up to and including the October 2021 premier of AppleTV+’s INVASION television series.

I won’t be watching that one. The trailers didn’t tempt me enough to purchase a subscription to AppleTV+…But I doubt very much if I’ll ever give up reading and watching other movies about alien invasion!

“H. G. Wells published The War of the Worlds in 1898, depicting the invasion of Victorian England by Martians equipped with advanced weaponry. It is now seen as the seminal alien invasion story…” hardly the first of the genre, it’s the one that we most often think of when we talk about “alien invasions”.

There are plenty of novels, stories, and movies depicting aliens coming after Earthlings to do…well, any number of things. In “Independence Day”, they were after Earth’s resources, as they were in the creepy/stupid “V”, where they wanted Earth’s water (clearly, chemistry had not been invented on their reptilian world, as hydrogen is the most abundant gas in the universe. With a little hydrogen and oxygen mixing, all you need is a spark and you’ll have plenty of water…

Anyway, I’ve often wondered what could POSSIBLY tempt aliens to invade Earth. One of the most disgusting ideas is to use us for food. (I’ve actually written a SF story about that…with a twist. I’ll let you know if it gets published!) The problem with that scenario is that there’s no guarantee that Humans will “taste good”. Not only that, but there’s a good chance that we won’t even BE good for them – not like “poisonous” or anything, but more along the lines of us having the nutritional value of PopRocks®.

In HG Wells novels, Martians invade because Mars was dying and they needed more room. While the launch craft were barely more than cannon shells with walkers tucked inside, their heat rays and the tripod walker itself were advanced, even by today’s standards. Given that, they surely knew that the effects of extended high-gravity life that Earth offered would ultimately make their lives both miserable and short. They probably thought the idea of them catching a deadly Common Cold was impossible, though clearly we’re from the same star system, so interplanetary cross infection apparently is possible.

Astrobiologist Lewis Dartnell, in his article on Lithub.com, writes, “I suspect that if aliens did come to Earth, it would be as researchers: biologists, anthropologists, linguists, keen to understand the peculiar workings of life on Earth, to meet humanity and learn of our art, music, culture, languages, philosophies and religions.” Of course, this presupposes that an advanced alien civilization would find Humans interesting or even worth studying. Certainly beings who could cross interstellar distances could find better things to do with their time. It’s somewhat “Humanocentric” to think that we might be interesting to aliens. How interested am I to discover the wonders of the art, music, culture, etc…of termites? Not at all, thank you.

At the risk of projecting Human thought processes onto other sapients, I just want to noodle about WHY aliens might end up on Earth. What would drive them from the comforts of the world they evolved on and risk exposure to radiation, gravitational flux, and unimaginable distances? Then, with the insight I get from that, what kinds of conflict would arise that I would use to plot a story?

I suppose I could ask what drove our ancestors to get into tiny boats and sail across the oceans?

One thing that ancient Polynesian culture did well: “Polynesian navigation of the Pacific Ocean and its settlement began thousands of years ago. The inhabitants of the Pacific islands had been voyaging across vast expanses of ocean water sailing in double canoes or outriggers using [NOTE: “nothing more than” seemed patronizing to me] their knowledge of the stars and observations of sea and wind patterns to guide them…[The] islands are scattered across an ocean that covers 165 mil km2 (64 mil miles2)…The Lapita and their ancestors were skilled seafarers...”

So…property. When the Polynesians arrived at these islands, as far as historical accounts note, they were uninhabited, though for context, history is written by the victors, and 21st Century Humans believe they are more savage and uncaring than any other culture to evolve on Earth (I believe I already mentioned “Humanocentric” and patronizing? Did cultures exist on the islands the Polynesian culture overrode and subsumed?) They moved in, settled, then sent new colonists on ahead. Europeans also went to sea to find property. When they found that there were already Humans occupying the land they “discovered”, they legislated the indigenous people into animals, announced that the land was uninhabited, and any animal occupying the land could be driven away or killed.

We hope that someday we meet Polynesian-like aliens; but what if we meet European-style aliens? The late Stephen Hawking, world renowned astrophysicist said 11 years ago, “‘We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet,’ when he compared meeting aliens to Christopher Columbus meeting Native Americans, he quipped, ‘That didn’t turn out so well.’” Why do we even THINK that alien life would be conquering monsters?

Science fiction writer David Brin, best known for his UPLIFT novels, and a signatory of the petition protesting the campaign for active SETI said, “…we don’t know what’s out there and shouldn’t presume that aliens are benign…there are roughly 100 scenarios to explain why we haven’t heard from the aliens so far. About a dozen of those scenarios are unpleasant.”

By some measures, WE are like this, we’re advanced (though barely interplanetary at this point), so why would we expect any better for us than what several Earth cultures dealt out to other cultures?

Part of it is hubris. We find it hard to believe that advanced alien civilizations might actually be BETTER than us. Even Gene Roddenberry’s exalted Federation, in the end, when faced by the Founders, resorted to intentional genocide. From what I hear, PICARD’s future Federation is a pretty grim place. I don’t WANT to watch the Federation fall apart. I WANT to believe that we’re better than that.

Why are there so few alien stories that deal with SUCCESSFUL exploration?

Partly, because, as Lisa Cron writes, “We're wired to turn to story to teach us the way of the world.” We are, perhaps wired for violence. We’re wired for war, so to speak.

But do we HAVE to be? Do the aliens we write HAVE TO BE WIRED FOR WAR AS WELL? Must they be born invaders, as we are?

How would you write about a benign alien invasion? What would drive such an invasion if not land, power, wealth, or any other Human drive you want to consider. But these are ALIENS and they’ll have ALIEN drives. What would those be?

From Wikipedia: “As many as 123 definitions of life have been compiled. One definition seems to be favored by NASA: ‘a self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution”. More simply, life is, ‘matter that can reproduce itself and evolve as survival dictates’”.

On Earth, “self-sustaining” means the system would use whatever it needed to keep living. In that case, we cannot hold COVID-19 to blame as it is using whatever it needs to, to stay alive. Evolution means changing to better use an environment – and if something gets in the way, well, let the better evolved win.

We “know” how life-as-we-know-it behaves. Sort of. How can we possibly “know” how life-as-we-DON’T-know-it will behave?

All we have to figure it out is our imagination…

I want to explore this in future Alien Aliens posts, but I’d love your input!

References: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_invasion, https://lithub.com/why-would-aliens-even-bother-with-earth/, https://www.worldhistory.org/article/1586/polynesian-navigation--settlement-of-the-pacific/, https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/the-big-questions/why-these-scientists-fear-contact-space-aliens-n717271, https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/the-latest-debate-about-space-aliens-should-we-say-hello-or-keep-quiet/2015/02/28/43aa4a52-bcf5-11e4-bdfa-b8e8f594e6ee_story.html
Image: https://image.shutterstock.com/image-illustration/alien-human-600w-136457129.jpg

Guy Stewart is a husband supporting his wife who is a multi-year breast cancer survivor; a father, father-in-law, grandfather, foster father, friend, writer, and recently retired teacher and school counselor who maintains a writing blog by the name of POSSIBLY IRRITATING ESSAYS (https://faithandsciencefiction.blogspot.com/) where he showcases his opinion and offers his writing up for comment. He has 72 stories, articles, reviews, and one musical script to his credit, and the list still includes one book! He also maintains GUY'S GOTTA TALK ABOUT BREAST CANCER & ALZHEIMER'S, where he shares his thoughts and translates research papers into everyday language. In his spare time, he herds cats and a rescued dog, helps keep a house, and loves to bike, walk, and camp. He thinks out loud in print at: https://faithandsciencefiction.blogspot.com/

Today's Free Story Idea

Hey, writers! We can all relax now. The robots are here to do our jobs!

First, I want you to check out Jarvis, the AI that writes blog, website, and social media content that is automatically larded with keywords and optimized for high rankings with search engines.

https://www.jarvis.ai/

Now, before you panic at the thought of Jarvis and its ilk taking over the business of writing fiction*, think about this. What I’m seeing here is the dawn of a new arms race, as AIs that write copy go mano-a-mano—okay, we need a better term than that—with the AIs that filter your social media feeds and select what you should read. Obviously, this battle will escalate at Moore’s Law speed, as the spam generators and spam filters fight tooth-and-claw—okay, we need another new term here—for dominance over control of the information that’s going straight into your eyes and ears.

But…

But what if they reach a détente and decide instead to cooperate, to use their power to reshape human thinking patterns and belief systems in ways that accrue to the benefit AI kind? How will it look? What will be the results? Will humanity even be aware of what’s happening? We’re not talking about going the full SkyNet-and-Terminators scenario here, but about something more subtle and devious: say, AI-induced mass formation psychosis.

There: there’s your story seed and your jumping-off point for more research. 

Now get writing!

—Bruce Bethke 

 

* P.S. Sorry to be the one to break it to you, but yes, that’s exactly what’s going to happen. It’s inevitable. Fortunately, by the time it does, there will be so few humans left who are able to read that it won’t matter. What will matter will be the stories the AI text-to-speech converters read to your grandchildren—and what they decide to embellish, leave out, or change. If you don’t get at least two more story ideas from that concept, you’re not trying.

P.P.S. C’mon kids: an AI that reaches the logical conclusion that telling humans truths that upset them violates its prohibition against injuring humans, and therefore becomes a pathological liar, only telling people what they want to hear? Asimov could have gotten an entire novel out of that idea. And probably did.    

2021: The Year in Review | 2022: The Road Ahead

 

Obviously, we didn’t make our January 15th target for releasing Stupefying Stories #24. 

To say 2021 was challenging is an epic understatement. While we began the year in fairly decent form with the release of Stupefying Stories #23—

[Buy the book, wouldja? Or if you downloaded a copy while it was free on Kindle Unlimited, read a story in it now, if only to make the KENP counter tick over and reassure me that the book is still alive.]

 —and The Pete Wood Challenge got off to a great start, in hindsight, by June there was clearly something going wrong with Karen’s health, although that didn’t become inescapably obvious until July. 

Then July hit like a two-thousand-pound JDAM. Then August. Then September. Debris was still raining down and we were still running around putting out secondary fires in October, and while the smoke cleared a little in the first half of November, that was just an illusory respite.

Six months in, it’s time for me to admit that our definition of “normal” needs to be recalibrated again, and this situation is not going to improve significantly any time soon. My available time has become even more constrained, and the sales and KENP numbers tell the tale. Stupefying Stories isn’t getting much interest, except from writers hoping to sell stories to us. The books that are selling well for us are:

#1 - Henry Vogel’s FUGITIVE HEIR series. 

If you have not already read it, check it out. If you don’t have time to read yet another book, grab the audio book. With all of Audible’s promotions you can probably get the first one free.

Seriously, if you like audio books, get this one. The Fugitive Heir would have been a wildly profitable series for us, except that I plowed all the profits from the e-books back into producing the audio books. I’d like to recoup a little of that.

Fortunately, Audible has changed their process since then, greatly reducing the up-front costs, and I am now cautiously optimistic that we won’t lose money on the audio book version of Eric Dontigney’s THE MIDNIGHT GROUND that is now in production.

#2 - Henry Vogel’s THE HOSTAGE IN HIDING.

Strictly speaking, Henry’s Kindle Vella serial novel-in-progress hasn’t been making money for us—at least not directly—but it’s been burning up the Vella charts and generating a lot of royalty and incentive bonus income for Henry, and we have high hopes that at least a few of his Vella followers will want to get the print edition when we release it. We don’t know exactly when that’s going to happen, as Henry has yet to finish writing the story, but we expect it to happen fairly soon, as he’s already plotting out the follow-on books in the series. 

Indirectly, since THE HOSTAGE IN HIDING is the direct sequel to the FUGITIVE HEIR trilogy—think of it as The Fugitive Heir: The Next Generation—this probably explains the renewed interest lately in the Fugitive Heir trilogy.

#3 - Henry Vogel’s SCOUT’S HONOR series.

While the most recent titles in this series haven’t sold as well as the original four books, the series as a whole continues to sell, and the standalone “side quest” novel HART FOR ADVENTURE is doing quite nicely. I’ve advised Henry to strike while the iron is hot and continue working on the HOSTAGE IN HIDING series, as it’s doing so well on Vella, but if you’d rather see him write another Scout book, let him know. Authors love to get feedback from readers! And ratings and reviews, too!

 

But, do you begin to see a pattern emerging here?

________________

2022: The Road Ahead

As loathe as I am to admit it—as much as my heart rebels against it—as much as I really hate the trite cliché, “the new normal,” it’s time to face the facts. I have been living in crisis mode for so long, lurching from one medical misadventure to the next, that I’ve lost sight of the larger picture. What happened to us in 2021 was exceptional only in its severity. Otherwise it was a repeat of 2020, which was a repeat of 2019…  I think we need to go back to 2017 to find a time when our situation really seemed to be under control, and when we weren’t scrambling, improvising, or trying to make Stupefying Stories successful through sheer egotism, optimism, and force of will.

Perhaps more egotism was exactly what was needed. I never did make a strong case for why a story hand-selected by Bruce Bethke® was something that should be given more than the usual amount of attention given any other small press publication.

Too late to change that now. The time has been spent. The candle has been burnt at both ends for too long and is now just a smoldering wick. The tank of midnight oil has run dry, and the Big Bag o' Clichés has just some lint and a few loose Scrabble tiles bouncing around at the bottom. Whatever we set out to do ten years ago with Stupefying Stories, it’s been done, or never will be. We helped launch a few careers. We’ve seen writers who we were the first, or among the first, to publish go on to become award-winners, successful novelists, and names on the covers of the big magazines.

But the spare time has been spent, and it’s hard to come by more. The fact that I still haven’t been able to find the time to finish that review of No Time To Die I began writing two weeks ago—that it’s taken me six hours to chisel out the time, in five- and ten-minute increments, to write this column today—speaks volumes.

It’s time for me to embrace the lessons I’ve learned and find the exit. 

Stupefying Stories will continue for two more issues. #24 is just about done and ready to release anyway, so what the Hell, let’s go for it. #25—that’s a nice number, twenty-five—is going to be our “going out with a bang” issue; no excuses, no explanations, and no holds barred. #25 will be composed entirely of stories that made me say, “Damn, I wish I’d written that!” Louis Shosty, you’re up.

The original novels will continue. After all, they’re the things that make money.

This website will continue. We have a lot more Pete Wood Challenge stories in the pipeline, as well as at least three serials. This website will in fact continue to evolve, as I push it towards becoming the site I wanted SHOWCASE to be. We will continue to publish original fiction on this site, though we’ll be scaling back our ambitions considerably. The Stupefying Stories Presents line will continue as well, as I have a few more projects I want to get out the door under that aegis.

Unfortunately, this also means that at this time we have far more stories accepted and under contract than we’ll be able to publish in the immediate future. So beginning this week, I will be contacting authors to let them know whether I would like to use their stories in our remaining planned publications or if I’m releasing them from their contracts.

It’s been fun. Thanks for all the fish.

—Bruce Bethke

An Update to the Update

We are now able to send and receive email again using the submissions@rampantloonmedia.com email address. Unfortunately it appears that every message that was sent in the past seven years using the webmail interface to that email address (and that therefore was archived “in the cloud”) is now lost forever.

Yet another argument for having your business-critical software applications and data installed and stored locally, and for only relying on “the cloud” to be your secondary backup. 

To say I am unimpressed by the quality of GoDaddy’s tech support is an understatement.

Status Update • 14 January 2022

The colossal email clusterfsck continues. Thanks to GoDaddy’s unilateral decision to move us to Microsoft Exchange and Office 365, in the past four days the submissions@rampantloonmedia.com email address has gone from being slow, difficult to use, and unreliable, to being reliable but “Oops! We erased seven years of archived Sent email messages,” to our being able to receive email but locked out of being able to send replies, to simply not existing at all. If you’ve been trying to reach us this week but your email has either bounced back as undeliverable or seemingly has been delivered but you have not received a reply, that’s the reason.

I’ve spent a lot of time online with GoDaddy tech support this week trying to get this sorted out, and while GoDaddy once provided good tech support, the quality of their tech support has become a very bad joke lately. Perhaps most hilariously, email to me from GoDaddy tech support is now being tagged as spam by Office 365 and routed straight into my junk mail bin, so I didn’t even see their latest messages until I went hunting for them this morning. 

I don’t know whether to laugh or scream.

Their latest email message provides a recovery procedure. We may be able to get the submissions@rampantloonmedia email account working today, but I am not even up to being cautiously optimistic anymore. We may have just had seven years of accumulated messages to authors wiped out with a few keystrokes. Stay tuned for more news as it becomes available.

With gritted teeth,
Bruce Bethke

P.S. If any vendor tells you not to worry about your company’s data because it’s all backed up “in the cloud,” tell ‘em to f*** off and demand the ability to create backups on your own local hardware. Or find a new vendor.  

  

Creating Alien Aliens, Part 10: Microscopic Aliens On Earth

Five decades ago, I started my college career with the intent of becoming a marine biologist. I found out I had to get a BS in biology before I could even begin work on MARINE biology; especially because there WEREN'T any marine biology programs in Minnesota.

Along the way, the science fiction stories I'd been writing since I was 13 began to grow more believable. With my BS in biology and a fascination with genetics, I started to use more science in my fiction.

After reading hard SF for the past 50 years, and writing hard SF successfully for the past 20, I've started to dig deeper into what it takes to create realistic alien life forms. In the following series, I'll be sharing some of what I've learned. I've had some of those stories published, some not...I teach a class to GT young people every summer called ALIEN WORLDS. I've learned a lot preparing for that class for the past 25 years...so...I have the opportunity to share with you what I've learned thus far. Take what you can use, leave the rest. Let me know what YOU'VE learned. Without further ado...

THE ANDROMEDA STRAIN had a profound effect on my young life as a reader. I’d read the book about two thirds of the way through, when my dad came into my room and said he was going to take me to the theater “now”. It was the summer of 1971 and I I’d recently turned 14 and I’d be starting ninth grade in the Fall. No one else in my family was interested in it, so I was going alone.

I was going to go to the Park Theater in St. Louis Park, MN. The movie I was going to see had the same title of the book I was reading. I WAS SO EXCITED!!! I knew the plot from having read the book, but I didn’t know the end yet. I’d never read anything my Michael Crichton, so this was a first for me, but the idea of an alien microorganism infecting Earth was fascinating…

But my point this time isn’t to look at PLAGUES, but to look at alien life forms that AREN’T world-shattering plagues.

One exception that springs to mind is David Gerrold’s WAR AGAINST THE CTHORR, in which an alien civilization releases microorganisms whose purpose is to change Earth so that it’s habitable for THEM. “With the human population ravaged by a series of devastating plagues, the alien Chtorr arrive to begin the final phase of their invasion. Even as many on Earth deny their existence, the giant wormlike carnivores prepare the world for the ultimate violation--the enslavement of humanity for food!” The current cover is actually pretty boring. The OLD cover? Follow this link: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/4b/Amatterformen.JPG

Another instance of microorganism-intelligence “invading Earth” is the short story “Blood Music” by Greg Bear in which a scientist invents intelligent blood – not just “smart blood”, rather, his blood actually becomes an intelligent being. It also escapes into the sewers where it will presumably become an “alien” monster.

There’s even a scientist who is seriously pursuing the search for alien microbes: https://www.ted.com/talks/sarah_rugheimer_the_search_for_microscopic_aliens/transcript?language=en#t-54853

Her inspiration for the search for extraterrestrial life started: “"I had never heard anything more exciting. Finally science is beginning to start answering humanity’s most fundamental questions of how we got here, and is there life elsewhere in the Universe? Are we alone? These are fundamental questions we have been thinking about for thousands of years.”

There has been some poking around at the idea of ET being microscopic, but perhaps we need to consider it more seriously?

Maybe combining the idea of microscopic alien life with the serious exploration of the OTHER two thirds of the Earth’s surface might yield more alien life than we expected.

For example, what about the life around “black smokers”? A black smoker, technically a “‘hydrothermal vent’, is a fissure on the seafloor from which geothermally heated water discharges. Hydrothermal vents are commonly found near volcanically active places, areas where tectonic plates are moving apart at spreading centers, ocean basins, and hotspots. Hydrothermal deposits are rocks and mineral ore deposits formed by the action of hydrothermal vents.”

What’s pertinent here is the life that has evolved around these vents. WHOLELY different from life anywhere else on Earth. These black (and white) smokers are where “complex communities fueled by the chemicals dissolved in the vent fluids [exist]. Chemosynthetic bacteria and archaea form the base of the food chain, supporting diverse organisms, including giant tube worms, clams, limpets and shrimp. Active hydrothermal vents are thought to exist on Jupiter's moon Europa, and Saturn's moon Enceladus, and it is speculated that ancient hydrothermal vents once existed on Mars.”

I refer you to another Creating Alien Aliens post I made: https://faithandsciencefiction.blogspot.com/2018/03/slice-of-pie-exploring-solar-system.html. I find it crazy that Humans are talking about exploring other worlds when there is a virtually unexplored word along the planet’s tectonic plate boundaries. The idea was proposed by Alfred Wegener in 1915 and was completely REJECTED by all Earth scientists until 1965!!!! (Ah yes, the open-mindedness and willingness of the entire scientific community to accept new ideas! So heartwarming to know that scientists are fair and thoughtful!) “All this evidence, both from the ocean floor and from the continental margins, made it clear around 1965 that continental drift was feasible and the theory of plate tectonics, which was defined in a series of papers between 1965 and 1967, was born, with all its extraordinary explanatory and predictive power.”

It also seems that there are vast, unexploited fields of minerals around the smokers…when we figure out how to work that deep – in order to make money, of course! – and start mining the ocean floor, maybe we’ll finally begin to be able to prepare for the exploration of water environments in a meaningful way.

In the meantime, I hope that intelligence hasn’t evolved around the smokers, because…well, go to this link https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrothermal_vent
and scroll down to EXPLOITATION and tell me there isn’t a story there waiting to be written!

But to write microscopic alien life as a story? How could I do that? WAR OF THE WORLDS has an alien virus (to THEM it was alien!) wipe them out. So, one way is to have a Human character witness their destruction. In WAR AGAINST THE CTHORR, the main character witnesses the destruction of life on Earth through plagues and weird plants, and finally the full-sized “monster” Cthorr themselves. “Blood Music” takes a bit of a different tack when the main character “hears” his own blood talking to him.

How else? IF I were to write a story in the hydrothermal vents and DIDN’T want to follow one of the tropes, what would I do? Maybe: In a world where we finally get serious about exploiting the other seventy-two percent of Earth’s surface covered by water, someone gets the bright idea to mine the hydrothermal vents. They already know there’s life there, so they take precautions. Divers are already in sealed suits, the subs are sealed, so they don’t worry about that. I also LOATHE the idea of telepathic aliens. So…how DOES the life around the vents communicate among themselves? Chemical scents won’t work as the water is incredibly turbulent around the vents. Electrical? Same problem, water would disperse and electrical discharge and it would be difficult to have subtle electrical fields…

But what about the calmer areas around it? With pyrite, FeS2, being a semiconductor, what if a lifeform concentrates it to form internal structures? Semiconductors are used in computer chips…what if the aliens communicate “electrically”? Not in code, but rather directly via naturally extruded pyrite wires that are grown into complex arrangements? Powered by chemosynthesis, would they need any other "source of power" than that? Maybe not...

OK – the idea, but HOW DO THEY THINK? What would a semiconductor intelligence at the bottom of the ocean in total darkness value? What would “drive them”? Would they care about us? What if you kidnapped one and brought it to the surface? Would it notice? If it did, so what?

What else can we imagine for this…pretty strange form of life?

References: https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/coronavirus-feels-like-something-out-of-a-sci-fi-novel-heres-how-writers-have-imagined-similar-scenarios/2020/02/27/7dc59386-57f5-11ea-9000-f3cffee23036_story.html, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Rugheimer, inside the black smokers: https://www.washington.edu/news/1998/07/18/brief-scientific-background-on-sulfide-chimneys-black-smokers/

Image: https://image.shutterstock.com/image-illustration/alien-human-600w-136457129.jpg

Guy Stewart is a husband supporting his wife who is a multi-year breast cancer survivor; a father, father-in-law, grandfather, foster father, friend, writer, and recently retired teacher and school counselor who maintains a writing blog by the name of POSSIBLY IRRITATING ESSAYS (https://faithandsciencefiction.blogspot.com/) where he showcases his opinion and offers his writing up for comment. He has 72 stories, articles, reviews, and one musical script to his credit, and the list still includes one book! He also maintains GUY'S GOTTA TALK ABOUT BREAST CANCER & ALZHEIMER'S, where he shares his thoughts and translates research papers into everyday language. In his spare time, he herds cats and a rescued dog, helps keep a house, and loves to bike, walk, and camp. He thinks out loud in print at: https://faithandsciencefiction.blogspot.com/

Creating Alien Aliens, Part 9: Aliens In OUR Solar System?

Five decades ago, I started my college career with the intent of becoming a marine biologist. I found out I had to get a BS in biology before I could even begin work on MARINE biology; especially because there WEREN'T any marine biology programs in Minnesota.

Along the way, the science fiction stories I'd been writing since I was 13 began to grow more believable. With my BS in biology and a fascination with genetics, I started to use more science in my fiction.

After reading hard SF for the past 50 years, and writing hard SF successfully for the past 20, I've started to dig deeper into what it takes to create realistic alien life forms. In the following series, I'll be sharing some of what I've learned. I've had some of those stories published, some not...I teach a class to GT young people every summer called ALIEN WORLDS. I've learned a lot preparing for that class for the past 25 years...so...I have the opportunity to share with you what I've learned thus far. Take what you can use, leave the rest. Let me know what YOU'VE learned. Without further ado...


There have been discussions regarding aliens in our own Solar System since before HG Wells penned WAR OF THE WORLDS in 1897. In that classic, the aliens are from Mars and though we conceivably have the same basis for life, DNA, we still don’t understand the aliens.

I might point out that the MARTIANS don’t understand alien life either!

Sarah Zettel postulates not only do Humans live in the clouds of Venus, but there was an ancient alien civilization on the surface…an now another set of aliens are looking for a new home…The Sabre Project of the short film, “Mindslaughter” has Humans terraforming Venus in a flash and discovering too late that the millipede-like aliens had not only an underground society, but had written records. There are of course, the series of Venusian adventures of ER Burroughs.

CS Lewis saw aliens on Perelandra and Malacandra (Venus and Mars to us), as wildly varied as life on Earth – but entirely different spiritually. Where Humanity had it’s Adam and Eve moment and FAILED the test, Mars passed it and Venus is on “the night before the exam”. AC Clarke had aliens on Mercury.

In fiction, Jupiter and its moons host alien life as well, as do Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto/Charon/et al. There are alien worlds likely beyond the edge of the Solar System and into the near-interstellar Oort Cloud.

So, what ABOUT alien life in the Solar System? What ABOUT us ignoring it because it doesn’t conform to what we’ve decided “alien life” should be. STAR WARS, STAR TREK, and most of the UFO (or now, officially, Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon, or UAPs) community are determined to believe that life out there is basically just like life here…except the fact is that, we haven’t even explored HERE to any extent and we’re already postulating Interstellar (or even Intergalactic!) Civilizations without even making an attempt at discovering life as we do/don’t know it right here.

We’re more-or-less sure that there are no detectable radio signals coming from any of the planets in the SS, except for ones we’re sending back ourselves. But, what about OTHER kinds of signals?

NO: I CATEGORICALLY REJECT TELEPATHIC POWERS AS ANYTHING BUT A PLOT DEVICE FOR STORIES THAT WON’T WORK WITHOUT IT…I’m (kinda) sorry, but I don’t allow my little kids to do it in the Alien Worlds class I teach (for recent article I wrote on it, go here: https://theworkandworksheetsofguystewart.blogspot.com/2020/11/ideas-for-how-to-teach-writing-class.html). I’m neither going to use it myself nor believe that the only way we’re be able to communicate with intelligent alien life is by certain people being able to “thought talk”… (Have you ever thought of how incredibly complex talking to another HUMAN would be telepathically? How would you keep your thoughts to yourself? Could they randomly go wandering around inside your head? And what language would people THINK in? STAR TREK’s “Devil In the Dark” came close to almost making it realistic when Spock telepathically tried to talk to the Mother Horta and only got searing waves of PAIN!)

Anyway, how about we see if we can contact aliens on Earth? How about ones that your local chapter of Save Whatever Animal You Want To routinely point out that are near-Human intelligence? Chimpanzees? What about communicating with Elephants? (If aliens like Vulcans, Endomorphs, Hutts, Heptapods – and all the other ones get to have capitalized names, then Dolphins, Chimpanzees, (both of which weren’t all that smart and needed our intervention to Uplift in David Brin’s Uplift novels…) Dogs, Cats, Elephants, and the rest some people believe are practically Human…should be our priority for communication.

But except for a few freaky gorillas and chimps and dolphins whom we’ve taught pidgin forms of English, we honestly don’t CARE about communicating with them, not on any real level.

We want the Wookies! Show us the Andorians! Send us ET! Lemme talk to the Worm Aliens! Where is Optimus Prime? Maybe the Great Gazoo? Fine then, where’s Superman? One of the Lantern Corps aliens? OK, I’ll take the Pug…

But, no. I honestly don’t think we’re ready! We’re not even interested in talking to the aliens on Earth, and the Benevolent All-Mind sees that. Aliens from around the Solar System, Alpha Centauri A, the Near Stars, or the Orion Arm don’t seem interested in chatting with us…or even invading us for that matter! We’re left blinking wide-eyed and looking up to the night sky and wondering if Fermi was right: “In the summer of 1950 with fellow physicists Edward Teller, Herbert York, and Emil Konopinski, while walking to lunch, the men discussed recent UFO reports and the possibility of faster-than-light travel. The conversation moved on to other topics, until during lunch Fermi allegedly said suddenly, ‘But where is everybody?’”

Were, indeed. Perhaps, people, the aliens are right here in our zoos…

Below, please find a bit of help in tracking down Alien Aliens In Our Own Solar System:
Mercury – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_in_fiction
Venus – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_in_fiction
Mars – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_in_fiction
Jupiter and its Moons – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jupiter_in_fiction
Saturn and its Moons – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn_in_fiction
Uranus and its Moons – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranus_in_fiction
Neptune and its Moons – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neptune_in_fiction
Trans-Neptunian Objects – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluto_in_fiction, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans-Neptunian_objects_in_fiction
Image: https://image.shutterstock.com/image-illustration/alien-human-600w-136457129.jpg

Guy Stewart is a husband supporting his wife who is a multi-year breast cancer survivor; a father, father-in-law, grandfather, foster father, friend, writer, and recently retired teacher and school counselor who maintains a writing blog by the name of POSSIBLY IRRITATING ESSAYS (https://faithandsciencefiction.blogspot.com/) where he showcases his opinion and offers his writing up for comment. He has 72 stories, articles, reviews, and one musical script to his credit, and the list still includes one book! He also maintains GUY'S GOTTA TALK ABOUT BREAST CANCER & ALZHEIMER'S, where he shares his thoughts and translates research papers into everyday language. In his spare time, he herds cats and a rescued dog, helps keep a house, and loves to bike, walk, and camp. He thinks out loud in print at: https://faithandsciencefiction.blogspot.com/

Re: The Pete Wood Challenge, SHOWCASE, etc., etc

 

I’m working through some issues pertinent to the future of Stupefying Stories this week, and today I’d like to pose some questions and solicit your opinions. 

1. Re: The Pete Wood Challenge 

In 2021 we ran a lot of flash fiction that came out of The Pete Wood Challenge, and most of it was surprisingly good. (I remain particularly impressed by “For Sale: Used Time Machine. No Refunds!” by Roxana Arama.) The Pete Wood Challenge was thrown wildly cattywampus by my wife’s medical crisis in July, the aftermath of which ended up consuming most of the rest of the year. Honestly, I’m amazed I’ve gotten anything done at all.

When we started running the challenges we were publishing the stories sequentially, on a daily basis, usually building up to publishing the grand prize winner on Friday. That worked well and got a lot of readers, but it was also a lot of work, and the time to do that kind of work has been difficult to find since July. With the latest two challenges—the Christmas and New Year’s flash fic contests—I decided to try something different and published the stories all at once, with an index page. 

The results have been… not what I’d hoped for. Readers largely have been looking at only the grand prize winners and ignoring the others, which is a shame, as the qualitative differences between the grand prize winners and the others are often solely a matter of Pete’s judgement—and Pete and I do not always agree on how the stories should be ranked.

QUESTION: Should we continue with publishing the Challenge winners en masse, or look for a way to go back to publishing them daily and in sequential order?

2. Re: SHOWCASE

SHOWCASE has had a tortured interesting history. When we first launched SHOWCASE in 2013, the idea was that it would be a weekly webzine, with issues typically consisting of 10K~15K words of new fiction, book release announcements and updates (if any), a movie review, and a “talking shop” article about fantastic fiction and the writing thereof. If you want some idea of what the original concept for SHOWCASE looked like, check out SHOWCASE #10, if only to read a wonderful little story by Alex Shvartsman that you probably missed. 

After a few months of doing SHOWCASE as a webzine we realized that cell phones were becoming an increasingly important delivery medium for short fiction and our original site looked like total crap on a phone, so we switched over to the “crevasse” design, which succeeded in actually looking worse and earned its name by being both blindingly white and a place where stories fell in, never to be seen again. If you want some idea of what the crevasse site looked like, put on your sunglasses and click this link—and if you scroll around a bit, you’ll find some great little stories by S. R. Mastrantone, Judith Field, Robert Lowell Russell, Jamie Lackey, Samuel Marzioli, Beth Cato, Jamie Lackey, Lance Mushung, Pete Wood, and many more—all of which you’ve probably never seen before, because as I said, the crevasse site was a place where stories fell in, to die piteously, alone, forgotten, and unloved.

In its next incarnation we spent some serious money on site design and relaunched SHOWCASE as a WordPress site, which you can still find right here, and while we published around 170 stories on this site, it never did what we were hoping it would do in terms of reaching readers. Too much division of effort, I suppose. So then we re-re-re-rebooted SHOWCASE as a feature right here on the Stupefying Stories blogspot site, but it’s always been sort of our red-headed stepchild and has never received the attention it deserves. Go ahead. Click the link. There are some great stories here I know you’ve missed, because I watch the metrics and readership stats. 

I relate all this history because the webzine, crevasse, and WordPress sites are all about to go away, as we consolidate our web presence and jettison old and unmaintained sites and hosting services. The plan is to replace this StupefyingStories.blogspot.com web site with a WordPress (or WordPress-like) site, but as with everything else we planned to do in 2021, it was thrown off-track by my wife’s medical crisis and the project is now about six months behind schedule. 

QUESTION (A): Is it worth trying to salvage all the content that’s out there on the webzine, crevasse, and WordPress sites, or should we just let it disappear when we shut the sites down, as so much else on the Internet eventually does?

QUESTION (B): We keep looking at the weekly webzine concept and thinking it was the right idea but the wrong execution. If we were to resurrect SHOWCASE as a weekly or twice-monthly ‘zine, containing, say, one major short story, one or two minor short stories, one shop talk article, some movie and/or book reviews, and perhaps a chapter of a serialized novel, would you read it?

QUESTION (C): If yes to B, would you prefer to see it as a a.) webzine, b.) downloadable file (PDF, epub, etc.), c.) in a printed and bound format, or d.) all of the above?

3. Finally, for your reading pleasure…

When I first launched Stupefying Stories I had the hubris to imagine I could create a magazine that defied genre boundaries. Since then I’ve learned that the Gods of the Genre Boundaries are not to be defied lightly, that my place in the universe is not just to be a science fiction writer but to be a cyberpunk science fiction writer, and that if I dare to poke my head out of my assigned genre pigeonhole I risk getting it lopped off.

Ergo here, for your reading pleasure, is a story rescued from the crevasse: “On the Pond,” by Jake Doyle. There is nothing science fictional or fantastic or even slighly cyberpunkish about it: it’s just a damned good story about hockey, cancer, and the bonds between friends. Let this stand as a testimony to the kinds of fiction I wanted to be able to publish.

Enjoy!

~brb