Ancient Logic

As part of my preparations for this weekend's Arisia, I've looked back over the idea of truly alien aliens. Tomorrow, I will be joining a panel concerned with this very same topic. Aliens are an abiding obsession in science fiction and appear in many of the classics of speculative literature generally. In fact, if a space opera doesn't contain some reference to aliens or unknown life-forms, it's considered a notable deviation (so called Mundane Science Fiction movement and Firefly both come to mind). There's a deeply-rooted expectation that science fiction will at some point address aliens. Why? I don't have any easy answers for this question. The topic itself is more unwieldy than it might appear. When we talk about aliens, are we just talking about the traditional space opera with human astronauts encountering strange cultures on distant planets? Are we also adding in first-contact stories, cosmic horror, and fantasy literature that includes references to ...

I am fascinated by certain things in movies regardless of other cinematic merits. Spaceships. Aliens. Ray guns. Cities being blown up. Mysterious conspiracies. Brent Spiner. The original Independence Day met all of these criteria and more my 19-year-old self hadn't even thought of. It was the first movie I spent my hard-earned money seeing multiple times. Yes, in retrospect (maybe even while watching it), the movie is flat-out ridiculous. The plot holes are large enough to fly one of the floating death frisbees through with plenty of shoulder room to spare. The speech from Bill Pullman (President Whitmore) is more than a little cringe inducing and Randy Quaid's character annoyed the hell out of me.  But that movie did have considerable heart for all of its silliness. And, perhaps because of the limitations of budget and special effects, the movie suggested way more than it actually showed. We never got an unobstructed view of the aliens or their mother ship or much of th...

We are long past the point in speculative fiction where seeing a bipedal cat works convincingly as an alien. Knowing how strange and multitudinous life is on our own planet gives speculative writers a special responsibility to envision alien life as least as weird and unpredictable as that we find around us. Morgan Crooks 2015 Way back in the 60s, during the New Age of science fiction authors were already beginning to chafe at the existing models of aliens - the bug-eyed octopuses and sentient cows. A reprint of Mutation Planet by Barrington J. Bayley shows  how potent previous generations of writers were at conjuring the truly alien. Aside from the baroque biological oddities described in this story, Barrington focuses on one of the most important aspects of xenogensis, quickly illustrating how different biologies fuel different imperatives. While the story bears some defects of its time, sexism and clunky dialogue, it nevertheless captured my imagination with its ruthless ...

I’ve learned that my story “This Beautiful Creature,” will appear in an upcoming science fiction anthology “Second Contacts,” published by Bundoran Press. Second Contacts explores what happens after humans make contact with aliens, each story set a couple of generations after the initial encounter. I’m including the table of contents below: Roof of Casa Batllo (taken by Morgan Crooks 2014) Introduction by Hayden Trenholm The Susans Come Home by Barry King Connoisseurs of the Eccentric by Jetse De Vries Soil of Truth by Nicole Lavigne Wash Away on Fiant Lux by Robin Wyatt Dunn Free Radical by David Tallerman Between the Worlds by Jordon Moore A Girl and Her Tentacle Monster by Naomi Libicki As Below, So Above by Matt Moore This Beautiful Creature by Morgan Crooks Translator by Albert Nothlit Grief by Karen Anderson Strong Arms Be Our Conscience by Andrew Barton Windigo by David Yeh The Peace of the Worlds by Jaime Babb Get the Message by Peter Wendt Scar Tiss...

The first night of Readercon was a special, abbreviated (and free) program. After getting a few reading suggestions from the "The Bit I Remember" panel, I made my way to the "Endangered Alien" panel. The premise of the discussion centered on the notion that contemporary SF has avoided the theme of aliens in recent years. Whether following the near-future ethos of William Gibson and Neil Stephenson, or embracing the near-earth space opera mode favored by Kim Stanley Robinson and Alastair Reynolds, science fiction hasn't had a lot of alien races in the past few years. I couldn't dismiss this idea out of hand. After a few moments of consideration, I could only remember a handful of novels in the past decade that described truly alien aliens. There have been plenty of virtual aliens (Charles Stross), transhuman aliens (Ian Banks), and human aliens (many examples but 'Shh! It's a Secret which I reviewed earlier this year, sticks out), but precious...

I'll give this to Brad Falchuk -- he has a keen sense of timing. The absorbing third episode of the American Horror Story, "Nor'Easter" is all the more effective owing to coming right on the heels of Sandy. Nature's fury seizes my imagination more tightly when the debris from an actual Superstorm still clutter my street. I could have used for even more of the storm actually. The radio mentions it, and the central conceit of the story, that Sister Jude (the operatic Jessica Lange) wants to calm the patients at the Briarcliff Mental Institution, depends upon it. But when it actually arrived, the sound studio torrents reminded me more of the final scene of Shawshank Redemption than some actual apocalyptic storm. American Horror Story doesn't seem to be shy about 'more is better,' elsewhere. The first episode introduced the asylum, it's inmates, a creepy sadistic Dr. Arthur Arden (James Cromwell), a nymphomaniac (Chloe Svegniy), a wife-killing psych...