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...
A session of 77th World Science Fiction Convention (Dublin 2019—An Irish Worldcon) posted this: “Like the dolphins of Hitchhiker’s Guide, nonhuman life can communicate with humans in numerous ways including non-verbal interactions, signaling, and even parasitism. Panelists from diverse fields of research discuss the oddness of life and the strange ways the natural world talks to us.” I wrote the following blog and I’ve updated it and added some thoughts for this post.
I confess that “non-human life can communicate...including…parasitism” was what caught my eye.
The obvious example leaped to mind, from Heinlein’s THE PUPPET MASTERS. But there have been others as well, the aliens from the ALIEN franchise are another one that sticks out. Dean Ing’s series “Anasazi” in ANALOG (July, 1980) and novel about the “users” is another one that caught me up in a weird world of biological parasitism. I’d just graduated from college with a biology education degree (which proved to be useless except for being a substitute teacher. Once I added a Earth science portion to it, I got a job…)
The website TV TROPES also has a list if you want to peruse it, at https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PuppeteerParasite
I get that dogs (we had two until recently, only one now); cats (three until recently and now just a male and female from the same litter); horses; and various other pets of various species, have been trained or bred to respond to and communicate with Humans. You could probably even consider plants as communicating with us.
I’m certain the “rotting meat” plant (carrion flowers – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrion_flower) communicates clearly that it “wants” nothing to do with Humanity. People go to see it and smell it for a “daring trip”. I can consider these as parasites communicating with Humans. But what I’m thinking of is “intelligent” communication. To look at that, maybe I could consider the largest most intelligent parasites on Earth.
While the malaria parasite seems to be noted as “super smart” (https://blogs.unimelb.edu.au/sciencecommunication/2012/10/21/a-super-smart-parasite/) , apparently lots of parasites control our minds: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/there-are-hundreds-examples-mind-controlling-parasites-180950312/. (Having suffered through malaria, reading about the HOW was distinctly creepy…)
But would we ever “meet parasitic aliens”? Seems to me unlikely. If parasites evolve on a planet, then they’re going to have hosts that evolved on the same planet, so making the leap between their evolved host on (say) Ceti Alpha V (Star Trek: Wrath of Khan) to Human ears seems…unlikely. Dramatically gross, but unlikely.
The aliens from ALIEN are likewise suspect. How is it that they can infect Humans? They have ACID for blood, for heaven’s sake! What would they possibly get from a Human? Our blood is iron-based with a pH between 7.35 and 7.45. For “blood” to be able to eat through armored plating, (speculation here: https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/x2pud/can_an_acid_be_as_corrosive_as_the_alien_blood_in/) it would need to be (and then looking it up and finding that HF’s pH = 3.27) some pretty powerful stuff. I’ve personally gotten car battery acid burns that were painful enough to check in with a doctor, but battery acid, which is H2SO4 = 0.7, dissolves just about anything that passes for life on Earth. Certainly Xenomorphs making contact with Humans would mostly be disastrous for us, probably not for them. This would seem to indicate that alien parasites would probably not bother with us.
For the sake of argument, let’s imagine that we DO meet parasitic aliens. I will stipulate that they CANNOT become parasitic on US. (Even to the point of laying an egg in a Human body that would develop seems…absolutely horrifying but biologically very difficult…) So, what can we do?
How about an intelligent alien parasite that has a host THAT WE FIND ATTRACTIVE? (NOT in a Sigourney Weaver way (she was 28 when she made the ALIEN movies…I was seven years younger…)) Let’s postulate a really gruesome parasite, say along the lines of a tapeworm. It has a dog-level of intelligence spread along proglottid-type segments when it implants in the host creature – a centauroid feline creature with a remarkably Human face, though with furry tentacles for arms. They do NOT have opposable thumbs and are, in themselves, no more intelligent than a horse or dog. The more proglottids the parasite grows, the smarter it becomes, and the more integrated it becomes with the host’s nervous system.
The intelligent tapeworms – the Taenapta – make contact with Humans from inside their hosts. We are swept off our feet by these heavenly beings and Humans are thrilled when they ask for our help. The Taenapta are aware of the Human opinion of both parasites and their mammal-o-centric bias (Duh! Look at STAR TREK and STAR WARS – Mammals reign supreme! Supposedly Klingons evolved from reptiles, but…really? Have you ever paused “Star Trek GENERATIONS” when Lursa and B'ator are onscreen? Klingon mammalian descent is obvious…), so they really don’t disabuse the fawning Humans of that notion.
How do PARASITES view the world?
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...
A session of 77th World Science Fiction Convention (Dublin 2019—An Irish Worldcon) posted this: “Like the dolphins of Hitchhiker’s Guide, nonhuman life can communicate with humans in numerous ways including non-verbal interactions, signaling, and even parasitism. Panelists from diverse fields of research discuss the oddness of life and the strange ways the natural world talks to us.” I wrote the following blog and I’ve updated it and added some thoughts for this post.
I confess that “non-human life can communicate...including…parasitism” was what caught my eye.
The obvious example leaped to mind, from Heinlein’s THE PUPPET MASTERS. But there have been others as well, the aliens from the ALIEN franchise are another one that sticks out. Dean Ing’s series “Anasazi” in ANALOG (July, 1980) and novel about the “users” is another one that caught me up in a weird world of biological parasitism. I’d just graduated from college with a biology education degree (which proved to be useless except for being a substitute teacher. Once I added a Earth science portion to it, I got a job…)
The website TV TROPES also has a list if you want to peruse it, at https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PuppeteerParasite
I get that dogs (we had two until recently, only one now); cats (three until recently and now just a male and female from the same litter); horses; and various other pets of various species, have been trained or bred to respond to and communicate with Humans. You could probably even consider plants as communicating with us.
I’m certain the “rotting meat” plant (carrion flowers – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrion_flower) communicates clearly that it “wants” nothing to do with Humanity. People go to see it and smell it for a “daring trip”. I can consider these as parasites communicating with Humans. But what I’m thinking of is “intelligent” communication. To look at that, maybe I could consider the largest most intelligent parasites on Earth.
While the malaria parasite seems to be noted as “super smart” (https://blogs.unimelb.edu.au/sciencecommunication/2012/10/21/a-super-smart-parasite/) , apparently lots of parasites control our minds: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/there-are-hundreds-examples-mind-controlling-parasites-180950312/. (Having suffered through malaria, reading about the HOW was distinctly creepy…)
But would we ever “meet parasitic aliens”? Seems to me unlikely. If parasites evolve on a planet, then they’re going to have hosts that evolved on the same planet, so making the leap between their evolved host on (say) Ceti Alpha V (Star Trek: Wrath of Khan) to Human ears seems…unlikely. Dramatically gross, but unlikely.
The aliens from ALIEN are likewise suspect. How is it that they can infect Humans? They have ACID for blood, for heaven’s sake! What would they possibly get from a Human? Our blood is iron-based with a pH between 7.35 and 7.45. For “blood” to be able to eat through armored plating, (speculation here: https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/x2pud/can_an_acid_be_as_corrosive_as_the_alien_blood_in/) it would need to be (and then looking it up and finding that HF’s pH = 3.27) some pretty powerful stuff. I’ve personally gotten car battery acid burns that were painful enough to check in with a doctor, but battery acid, which is H2SO4 = 0.7, dissolves just about anything that passes for life on Earth. Certainly Xenomorphs making contact with Humans would mostly be disastrous for us, probably not for them. This would seem to indicate that alien parasites would probably not bother with us.
For the sake of argument, let’s imagine that we DO meet parasitic aliens. I will stipulate that they CANNOT become parasitic on US. (Even to the point of laying an egg in a Human body that would develop seems…absolutely horrifying but biologically very difficult…) So, what can we do?
How about an intelligent alien parasite that has a host THAT WE FIND ATTRACTIVE? (NOT in a Sigourney Weaver way (she was 28 when she made the ALIEN movies…I was seven years younger…)) Let’s postulate a really gruesome parasite, say along the lines of a tapeworm. It has a dog-level of intelligence spread along proglottid-type segments when it implants in the host creature – a centauroid feline creature with a remarkably Human face, though with furry tentacles for arms. They do NOT have opposable thumbs and are, in themselves, no more intelligent than a horse or dog. The more proglottids the parasite grows, the smarter it becomes, and the more integrated it becomes with the host’s nervous system.
The intelligent tapeworms – the Taenapta – make contact with Humans from inside their hosts. We are swept off our feet by these heavenly beings and Humans are thrilled when they ask for our help. The Taenapta are aware of the Human opinion of both parasites and their mammal-o-centric bias (Duh! Look at STAR TREK and STAR WARS – Mammals reign supreme! Supposedly Klingons evolved from reptiles, but…really? Have you ever paused “Star Trek GENERATIONS” when Lursa and B'ator are onscreen? Klingon mammalian descent is obvious…), so they really don’t disabuse the fawning Humans of that notion.
How do PARASITES view the world?
Their first assumption would be that Humans are hosts to some sort of parasitical intelligence -- because they are. What would the discovery that the Human was the intelligence and that the parasites that inhabit us are just disease – or even undesirable! What would the Taenapta think of discovering this little tidbit: “Tapeworm infections are usually treated with an oral medication, such as praziquantel, which paralyzes the adult tapeworm. The praziquantel causes the tapeworms to detach from the gut, become dissolved, and then pass out of your body through your stool.”? [Another story: thinking the lovely lion centauroids are being held captive, someone gives them a powerful dose of praziquantel to FREE THE TAENAPTA!!!!]
Their view of the world would not only be through the eyes of their host, but also through the mindset that only small, hidden creatures can rule the world, encased in a brutish “tank” of a highly mobile host that is both strong enough and intelligent enough to protect itself – and subsequently are a sort of armor for the Taenapta – but hosts have no intrinsic value and are exchangeable. Sort of a Trill symbiont, but one that doesn’t value its host any more than we value our horses, cats, dogs, and elephants…
In fact, what if the Taenapta chose ELEPHANTS to use as transport creatures? Now THERE’S a another story idea!
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/
Their view of the world would not only be through the eyes of their host, but also through the mindset that only small, hidden creatures can rule the world, encased in a brutish “tank” of a highly mobile host that is both strong enough and intelligent enough to protect itself – and subsequently are a sort of armor for the Taenapta – but hosts have no intrinsic value and are exchangeable. Sort of a Trill symbiont, but one that doesn’t value its host any more than we value our horses, cats, dogs, and elephants…
In fact, what if the Taenapta chose ELEPHANTS to use as transport creatures? Now THERE’S a another story idea!
Image: https://image.shutterstock.com/image-illustration/alien-human-600w-136457129.jpg
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