Octopus Superpowers

I came across another article about the delightful weirdness and surprising intelligence of octopuses:

10 Incredible Facts About Octopuses

In addition to their amazing powers of camouflage, shapeshifting, and squeezing through tiny spaces, they can use tools, recognize people, and solve problems such as opening jars and navigating mazes. They would make an excellent template for an alien sapient species.

With their eight flexible arms, they arguably have a greater capacity for manipulating objects than we do. However, one problem would inhibit them from developing an advanced technological culture, no matter how intelligent they might become -- their aquatic environment. An underwater creature can't use fire and therefore can't work with metal.

One species, though, spends a nontrivial amount of its life on land:

Adopus Aculeatus

This small octopus "lives on beaches walking from one tidal pool to the next hunting for crabs." We could imagine a planet rich in tidal ecosystems dominated by an intelligent population of amphibious octopuses. For them to invent what we'd consider an advanced civilization, though, their evolutionary history would need to include some urgent motivation for developing such skills. No doubt a clever science fiction author could come up with a plausible scenario to produce that result.

Unfortunately for Earth octopuses' prospect of developing intelligence to rival ours and filling an aquatic niche similar to the human land-bound role, their short lifespans and habit of dying soon after reproducing limit them. Creating a culture that could transmit knowledge from older to younger generations would require a mutation to lengthen their lives.

Another potential limitation might be their solitary lifestyle. Typically, most highly intelligent animals are social. Also, community cooperation would seem to be a requirement for a civilization -- at least, in the sense that we understand it.

An interesting side note: Their copper-based blood is blue. So why is Vulcan copper-based blood green? :)

Margaret L. Carter

Please explore love among the monsters at Carter's Crypt.

Karen S. Wiesner: Oldies But Goodies {Put This One on Your TBR List} Book Review: The Host by Stephenie Meyer

Oldies But Goodies

{Put This One on Your TBR List}

Book Review: The Host by Stephenie Meyer

by Karen S. Wiesner

After I finished my last writing reference, I'd started to hear about what I thought was a "flavor of the day" trend going around writing circles. In direct opposition of everything I'd ever taught about the crucial need to go deep with characters, writers were being told that it's best not to include more than basic information about main characters, not even providing last names for them--this supposedly allows readers to fill in the blanks with their own details, making the characters whatever they wanted them to be.

I can't impart to you just how much I disliked that idea then, and how much I hate it now. First, my characters don't belong to readers. They belong to me. And, since they're mine, I choose who they are and what they stand for, what choices they make. It's inconceivable to me that any writer would surrender proprietary rights of character development to readers, that author's don't care enough about every aspect of their stories and craft to protect them from poking and prodding, breaches and violations. Beyond that, how can character development be fluid enough to allow something like that without compromising everything vital in a story? There can be no solid ground in that situation.

Individual character choices directly influence outcomes. That's a no brainer. Logically, if a character isn't well defined, motives and purposes are constantly in question as well as in flux. Additionally, if readers can't understand where the characters are coming from, then how can the story make any kind of sense? 

Ultimately, how can readers root for characters and want them to succeed? They can't. Readers not emotionally invested enough to, frankly my dear, give a damn what happens move on, unimpressed. Don't kid yourself: A story without impact is quickly forgotten.

Unfortunately, what I thought was a trend that would come and go quickly ended up becoming the norm in the last few years. So many of the books I read these days, the films and TV shows I watch have characters that just make no impact on me whatsoever. Even if I'm captured by a plot, the imbalance of bad things happening to unformed lumps of clay that haven't bothered trying to convince me to care…well, what can I say? I'm not moved. There's more of an eh, so what? response while I move on and I don't look back.

This really came home to me recently. I watched the science fiction suspense movie called I.S.S. and, later, someone asked me how it was. My response? "It was good with a compelling plot, but I never learned much of anything about the characters involved in the conflict. Bits here and there." At the end of the movie, the survivors had a short conversation, to the effect of:

#1: "Where are we going?"

#2: "I don't know."

My brain reacted to this with a sum up with, Who cares?

I was barely curious about what might happen next, though normally I hate stories that end on a cliffhanger.

I can't help feeling about this and other stories like it, what a waste. This film could have been so much better, so much more memorable if only the writers cared enough to make us care. Another forgettable installment that'll fall by the wayside instead of resonating with people for longer than the one hour and thirty-five minutes it took to watch it.

For at least the past year, I've found myself much less interested than usual in reading anything new because it's such a rare thing now to find something with a good balance of character and plot development. In my mind, both are required if I'm going to invest myself emotionally, physically, and financially. So I've been re-reading books from my huge personal library that I liked enough to put on my keeper shelves in the past. Over the next month or two, I thought I'd revisit a few of these oldies but goodies with reviews.

The Host was the first new work by Stephenie Meyer after the Twilight Saga reached its pinnacle. Published in 2008, the romantic science fiction tells the tale of Earth being invaded by an enemy species in a post-apocalyptic time. A "Soul" from this parasitic alien race is implanted into a human host body. In the process, the original owner loses all memories, knowledge, even the awareness that any other consciousness ever existed. However, one Soul, called Wanderer (or Wanda), quickly realizes its original host won't be so easily subdued. Melanie Stryder is alive and well and begins communicating with Wanda. Like it or not, Wanda begins to sympathize and realize the violation her species has visited upon humans. The movie adaptation in 2013 was faithful to the story told in the book.

It's never easy for an author that reached the heights of fame Stephenie Meyer did when Twilight fever swept the world to move past such an epoch. The Guardian reviewer Keith Brooke, unfairly I think, said of The Host, "The novel works well, and will appeal to fans of…Twilight…but it is little more than a half-decent doorstep-sized chunk of light entertainment." The Host was well-written and interesting, a solid balance between fully fleshed out characters and conflicts. I enjoyed it. Its only real flaw was falling in the shadow of its dazzlingly bright predecessor.

The author has said she'd like to make this book into a trilogy, and in February 2011, she reported she'd completed outlines for them, even done some writing. Thirteen years later, the only non-Twilight related work from the author has been The Chemist, released in late 2016, a suspense story with no connection to her previous books. Sometimes it's hard to return to things you've been away from for so long, they no longer feel like your own. Maybe that's the case here, and if it is, luckily the story contained in The Host is satisfying without requiring anything more to tie up loose threads.

Next week, I'll review another Oldie But Goodie you might find worth another read, too.

Karen Wiesner is an award-winning, multi-genre author of over 150 titles and 16 series.

Visit her website here: https://karenwiesner.weebly.com/

and https://karenwiesner.weebly.com/karens-quill-blog

Find out more about her books and see her art here: http://www.facebook.com/KarenWiesnerAuthor

Visit her publisher here: https://www.writers-exchange.com/Karen-Wiesner/

SF Terminology Goofs

I've started watching the second season of MY DAD THE BOUNTY HUNTER, a cartoon series on Netflix. Some dialogue passages reminded me of a few of my "pet peeves" concerning language too often found in science fiction print and film stories.

The most annoying and most common: "Intergalactic" for "interstellar." There's no indication in the Netflix series that the characters ever leave this galaxy. Careless writers commit this mistake in far too many works I've read or watched. In J. D. Robb's "In Death" series, "intergalactic" sometimes appears even when "interplanetary" is clearly meant. Maybe those books should be pardoned, however, because they're narrated mainly in the viewpoint of homicide detective Eve Dallas. She seems to take the same attitude toward scientific facts as Sherlock Holmes, who famously says he doesn't know whether the Earth revolves around the Sun or vice versa and doesn't want his brain cluttered with that knowledge.

The kids in MY DAD THE BOUNTY HUNTER get all excited to discover their mother is not only an alien but an "alien space princess," and she doesn't correct their terminology. Her family lives on a planet. Her parents don't rule a sector of space; they rule part of a planet. She's no more a "space princess" than Queen Elizabeth II was a "space queen." Moreover, there's a tendency for the dialogue to refer to anyone not from Earth as an "alien" even in contexts where that usage makes it sound as if they think of THEMSELVES as aliens.

Although it's not in this series, there's a glaring error I've noticed in some speculative fiction by writers not trained in science, I hope a result of carelessness rather than ignorance, but still: Referring to light-years as a unit of time rather than distance. Even C. S. Lewis does this, in THE SCREWTAPE LETTERS.

Not an error, but an example that strikes me as lazy worldbuilding, is the widespread habit of labeling units of currency "credits." Sure, because it's so commonplace, it's immediately recognizable as a convenient shorthand for money. But don't creators of alien societies have any more imagination than that? Or do they think civilizations on other worlds don't have enough imagination to give their monetary units a non-generic name? Nations on Earth have words for their money grounded in tradition, history, and politics; extraterrestrial societies should follow similar patterns.

The new QUANTUM LEAP series explains how the leaper sort-of-replaces the past-time individual as a function of "quantum entanglement." That hypothesis deals with subatomic particles, however, and has only the most tenuous resemblance, if any, to what the leaper experiences. But I feel justified in giving the QUANTUM LEAP writers a pass on this point, even if they have no idea what they're talking about. Most likely, even if they do, they don't expect more than a tiny fraction of the audience to know what "quantum entanglement" means; they probably just chose a science-y sounding term. Like the STAR TREK "doubletalk generator," as author David Gerrold calls it (as in, "Captain, that last photon torpedo destroyed the doubletalk generator, and the Enterprise will explode in nineteen minutes!"), the phenomenon might as well be labeled "magic."

Margaret L. Carter

Please explore love among the monsters at Carter's Crypt.

Giant Viruses

Scientists have discovered and revived a 30,000-year-old virus, not seen since the Upper Paleolithic era, buried under the Siberian permafrost:

Ancient Giant Virus

This organism is "giant" on the virus scale; that is, it's big enough to be seen with an ordinary microscope. Fortunately, it poses no danger to humanity. It survives and reproduces by infecting a species of amoeba. However, the fact that this microbe remains infectious after so many millennia of dormancy implies that "it's possible that dangerous viruses do lurk in suspended animation deep belowground. . . . These viruses are buried deep, so it's likely that only human activities — such as mining and drilling for minerals, oil and natural gas — would disturb them."

Has any SF novelist used this premise in an apocalyptic novel about a pandemic for which no immunity or cure exists? Inevitably, the concept of a dangerous organism frozen in suspended animation for tens of thousands of years brings to mind the alien shapeshifter discovered in Antarctica in John W. Campbell's classic story "Who Goes There?" (adapted to film at least three times, first as THE THING FROM ANOTHER WORLD). Also lurking at the South Pole, prehistoric shoggoths are awakened in H. P. Lovecraft's AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS.

Or could microscopic life on Mars from thousands or millions of years ago be merely dormant rather than extinct?

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

The Most Intelligent Animals

Well, maybe not THE most in absolute terms, but this page lists six of the top candidates:

6 of the World's Most Intelligent Animals

The only one that surprised me was the pig. While I knew they were smart, I didn't know that in some categories they're thought to rank with dolphins. The other five on the list are the two most obvious, dolphins and chimpanzees, plus ravens, octopuses, and elephants.

Each paragraph on the page includes links to several other sites offering more information about the particular species and how its intelligence has been studied.

Although not mentioned on that web page, other species that would plausibly evolve sapience might include raccoons and bears. Both of them have the ability to manipulate objects and are already smart enough to defeat with ease many human attempts to keep them out of buildings, vehicles, and containers. Until our family bought better-designed garbage cans some years ago, we had to tie the lids on to protect the trash from raccoons. As for bears, you've probably seen photos or videos of them breaking into houses and cars. Scary! Maybe Yogi and Boo-Boo have a basis in fact.

As usual, this topic makes me wonder whether we'd recognize human-level intelligence in analogous alien species if we met them on distant planets. Their languages might not consist of sounds as ours does. (Maybe sapient octopuses would communicate by changing their colors.) Suppose lack of manipulative appendages, as with dolphins, prevented them from inventing material technologies we would recognize as such? What if, like dolphins and octopuses, they inhabited an environment (e.g., water) difficult for us to explore? Also, an ethical question comes to mind: If we don't exercise sufficient respect toward quasi-intelligent species we already know about on our own planet, will be behave ethically toward creatures we've yet to meet on strange new worlds?

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Sex Lives of Animals

I've been rereading DR. TATIANA'S SEX ADVICE TO ALL CREATION, by evolutionary biologist Olivia Judson. As the title implies, the book is formatted like an advice-to-the-lovelorn column, with each inquiring letter from a perplexed organism used as the springboard for discussion of similar behavior in a wide range of species. The lively explorations of often bizarre sexual customs are supported by twenty-four pages of notes and an extensive bibliography. Not only are the descriptions entertaining in themselves, they delve into the reasons why evolution produced such behaviors and how they promote the survival of the species. The mating habits of "lower" animals could spark fascinatingly strange ideas for alien biology.

Suppose sentient species on other worlds shared some of those bizarre (to us) customs. If the male typically gets eaten during copulation and contentedly accepts this fate in order to nourish his beloved and their children, maybe a network of rituals would grow up around the process of his offering himself to be consumed. Maybe males would compete to become plump and nutritious. Imagine an intelligent species in which the newly hatched infants always eat their mother's body, as with some spiders. Their society would have to include a caste of caretakers and educators to bring up the young. Almost nobody would have a living mother, and the rare female who selfishly refused to let herself be devoured would be ostracized. Maybe a females' rights movement would develop an artificial infant food source to liberate mothers from inevitable death, so they could lead long, productive lives. Hive insects such as bees, of course, are dominated by females with few males, whose function is limited to mating, but among the females only the queen breeds. Terry Pratchett's Nac Mac Feegle, diminutive but bellicose fairy folk, live in a similar colony, except that the queen (or "kelda") is the only female, married to one of the males and sister-in-law or mother to all the rest.

There's a marine worm that can change its sex repeatedly throughout its lifetime. The switch depends on the size and sex of the worm's partner. When a pair stays together long-term, both eventually become hermaphrodites. Ursula Le Guin's LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS features a world where people shift between male and female depending on the random chance of which sex their current mate happens to become that month. The difference from the transsexual marine worm is that Le Guin's aliens revert to neuter for most of each month. She devised this reproductive system as a thought experiment on how a society without sex differences would work. A few Earth creatures start out as females and later transform into males; the Martians in Heinlein's RED PLANET and STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND have this kind of life cycle. One category of organisms, slime molds and green algae among them, may have hundreds of sexes. That doesn't mean five hundred of them need to get together to produce offspring. It means each sex cell is genetically distinct from the other kinds, and there are rules as to which can pair up. The social functions of reproduction and parenting would look very different in a slime mold society from the way they work in ours. In the more conventional male and female pairings we're familiar with, imagine an intelligent species reproductively similar to seahorses, in which the male gestates and gives "birth" to the young. Or suppose we were like certain bats whose males as well as females secrete milk to feed their offspring. Either of those species would probably have a society where females, not being biologically tied down to child care, could enjoy much more independence than in traditional Earth cultures. What about a world of women who reproduce by parthenogenesis, as some animals are capable of doing? All-female societies reproducing parthenogenetically have often appeared in science fiction, such as the world of Whileaway in Joanna Russ's THE FEMALE MAN and the post-apocalyptic setting of Suzy McKee Charnas's MOTHERLINES.

Here's a page that gives an overview of numerous examples of odd animal reproductive behavior, with lots of links:

The Sex Lives of Animals

Nonhuman animals have been found to engage in just about any unusual or "perverted" human sexual practice you can think of, including bestiality (copulating with a member of an unrelated species) and necrophilia. Those two habits, as the article points out, must be simply mistakes in evolutionary terms, since they can't result in reproduction. According to DR. TATIANA'S SEX ADVICE, however, the most deviant sexual custom of all, judging by its rarity is—monogamy.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Life Not as We Know It

One episode of the BBC series PLANET EARTH: BLUE PLANET II highlights denizens of the ocean depths that thrive independently of energy from the sun. They rely on energy from other sources, and some have no need of oxygen.

Some live in methane-rich environments known as "cold seeps" or "cold vents":

Cold Seeps

These spots aren't "cold" in the absolute sense, just less hot than the hot vents referenced below. Bacteria, mussels, and tube worms live happily in the methane or hydrogen sulfide of these ecosystems. Some individual tube worms have been estimated to survive for 250 years in such locations. If similar life-forms developed on other planets in environments like these, in the absence of competition from oxygen-dependent and sunlight-dependent creatures, and eventually became intelligent, a lifespan of that length would allow them plenty of time to learn and pass on their learning to future generations.

Other organisms have evolved in the volcanically active areas around hydrothermal vents, where water can reach temperatures of several hundred degrees Fahrenheit:

Hydrothermal Vents

Like inhabitants of cold vents, life-forms in hydrothermal vents also depend on chemosynthetic bacteria for food. Crustaceans, tube worms and other types of worms, gastropods such as snails, and even eels are among some of the creatures that populate these locations. It's believed that life on Earth may have originated in an environment like this. Again, on a planet where this kind of environment dominated, we can imagine that hyrdrothermal-vent species might evolve sentience and intelligence.

So living creatures can exist right here on our planet in conditions that would be lethal to most Earth species. The quest for extraterrestrial life needn't confine itself to oxygen-rich environments. Moreover, we don't have to expect advanced beings to conform to the familiar humanoid shape. In Heinlein's HAVE SPACE SUIT, WILL TRAVEL, the teenage narrator describes the villain, an invader from a distant solar system. He's puzzled that these decidedly inhuman-looking aliens can survive in Terran environmental conditions, until he reminds himself that spiders resemble us much less, yet they live in our houses. We don't have to search beyond Earth's ecological systems to find bizarrely alien creatures.

The Wikipedia articles include some color photos of those exotic organisms. Take a look.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Deep Time

The September 2019 issue of the SMITHSONIAN magazine contains two articles I found especially interesting.

"The Homecoming": An ancient skeleton of an Australian aborigine is returned to his people for ceremonial reburial. This individual, known as Mungo Man, lived about 40,000 years ago, one of the oldest specimens of Homo sapiens found outside of Africa. Previously, conventional wisdom maintained that the aborigines had migrated to Australia at most 20,000 years ago. Current estimates place the arrival of human inhabitants between 47,000 and 65,000 years ago. By contrast, the earliest known Egyptian pyramid is less than 5000 years old.

"Saturn's Surprise": The water ice that makes up the rings of Saturn is raining down onto the planet, so that the rings will eventually cease to exist. They may disappear in "only" 100 million years—eons compared to the length of time anatomically modern human beings have existed, about 200,000 years, but a minute fraction of the estimated 4.5-billion-year life of the solar system.

Yet another SMITHSONIAN article delving into relative antiquity, "The New Treasures of Pompeii," reports the latest investigations of a Roman city destroyed by a volcanic eruption less than 2000 years ago, in 79 A.D. That's nothing compared to the age of Mungo Man but a long time in the perception of most Americans, for whom the 400-year-old Jamestown settlement seems ancient.

Both the article on Mungo Man and the one on Saturn highlight the vast expanses of time (contrasted with a single human life, anyway) covered by the history of our species and the unimaginably longer history of our solar system, not to mention the universe as a whole.

How would an immortal alien, or even one with a lifespan measured in millions of years, regard us? Would we be able to communicate with such an entity at all? Mark Twain, in a passage included in the posthumous collection LETTERS FROM THE EARTH, sardonically compares the lifespan of the human race in the context of the history of the cosmos to the thin layer of paint atop the Eiffel Tower, with the tower representing the age of the universe. Twain asks how we can believe ourselves to be the pinnacle of creation. That's like believing the entire tower was built for the sake of the skin of paint on the top. Maybe an incredibly long-lived species would see us that way. On the other hand, maybe a million-year-old intellect would view tiny, ephemeral creatures with compassion.

The immortal, cosmic, transdimensional entity in Stephen King's IT (the second half of the film adaptation comes out this week) finds human beings interesting enough to torture and feed on. Let's hope that if similar entities exist and we eventually meet them, they will have matured beyond a sadistic appetite for the fear and pain of lesser beings.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

The Vampire as Alien

I'm thrilled that my nonfiction book DIFFERENT BLOOD: THE VAMPIRE AS ALIEN is back on the market at last. It's been re-released by a new publisher with some updating and a fantastic new cover:

Different Blood

This is a work of critical analysis that surveys the widely varied forms of the "vampire as alien" trope in fiction from the second half of the nineteenth century to the early twenty-first. By "alien," I mean a naturally evolved creature (regardless of whether earthly or extraterrestrial) rather than a supernatural undead entity. So DIFFERENT BLOOD examines one subset of the science-fiction vampire. Readers may be surprised to discover how many amazing stories and novels fall into that category.

In the Amazon "Look Inside" feature, you can read the introduction and part of Chapter One to get a sense of the flavor of the text. I've drawn upon Jacqueline Lichtenberg's essays such as "Vampire with Muddy Boots" and her article on Intimate Adventure to set the stage for my treatment of the topic. You'll find references to those essays in the introduction. To borrow Jacqueline's terms, I'm fascinated by the way most "vampire as alien" fiction deals with nonhuman characters in an SF framework instead of portraying them as "the Unknown that is a menace because it's a menace."

Naturally, Jacqueline's THOSE OF MY BLOOD is one of the books discussed, as well as HOUSE OF ZEOR and the philosophy underlying the Sime-Gen series. One delightful aspect of writing DIFFERENT BLOOD was having a chance to highlight lots of my favorite novels and stories that develop the figure of the vampire in original, provocative ways. I've always admired the way the vampire, as the most versatile of all the traditional monsters, can be used to explore gender, race, ecological responsibility, predator-prey dynamics, symbiosis, and many other themes; the concept of "alienness" is ideally suited for this exploration. I hope DIFFERENT BLOOD introduces readers to numerous works of exciting, innovative fiction they haven't encountered before.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

When It Will Change

In the March-April 2019 issue of FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION, an article by Jerry Oltion discusses what effect the confirmed discovery of extraterrestrial life would have on the people of Earth. His provocative answer in "E.T. Shmee-T" is "not much." Astronomers seeking evidence of life on other solar planets or around distant stars assume that if we knew we weren't alone in the universe, the "effect on human society" would be "profound." The knowledge would either humble us, inspire us, or (according to Stephen Hawking) possibly destroy us. Oltion thinks the majority of the population would simply continue their daily lives with, at most, mild interest in the discovery.

He points out, citing numerous examples (many of them new to me), that throughout most of human history, many people have believed the moon and planets to be inhabited. In 1795, astronomer William Herschel even proposed that the sun was inhabited. These beliefs had no practical effect on the life of the average person. As Oltion acknowledges, one reason why nobody cared about life on other worlds was that we had no way of reaching them. However, he doesn't think most people's lives and attitudes would change even if aliens landed on Earth, an opinion I disagree with. Granted, people's day-to-day activities would probably go on much the same as always, at least at first. But I think the long-term effects would permeate and alter our culture. As for long-distance communication proving the existence of aliens, the impact on our culture would depend on what kinds of information we received. Alien technology could significantly change life as we know it even if we're never able to meet the aliens face-to-face. What about religion? Oltion thinks the predicted philosophical and religious upheaval wouldn't materialize. If the aliens turned out to look humanoid, missionaries might try to convert them—and how would that be different, except in scale, from the missionary ventures of our own history?

The March 2019 issue of NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC, coincidentally, leads with an article on the current search for extraterrestrial life. According to an estimate cited in the article, based on the data gathered by the Kepler space telescope, our galaxy should contain about 25 billion planets in the "habitable zone"—worlds where life as we know it could evolve. SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) is only one of many routes to the goal of finding alien life. The next generation of telescopes may have the power to search for visual traces of chlorophyll. Spectrometer analysis may detect free oxygen in a planet's atmosphere. SETI, of course, concentrates on analyzing radio waves for signs of artificially created signals. We inhabit a big universe, as the article points out; the fact that SETI hasn't found any such signs yet doesn't mean there's nothing to find. In 2015 an investor named Yuri Milner established the Breakthrough Initiatives, an organization committed to the search for alien civilizations and extra-solar life in general, to the tune of at least 200 million dollars.

Surely if these quests were successful, the public reaction and the impact on society and culture would vary depending on the form the revelation took. There are big differences among finding evidence of extraterrestrial life, discovering signs of sapient extra-solar beings with an advanced civilization, and having firsthand contact with alien visitors. Judging from the experiences of pre-industrial Earth societies during early contacts with Europeans, wouldn't the physical advent of aliens on our planet have a "profound" effect? In support of Oltion's position, however, we do have "All Seated on the Ground," a typically witty Connie Willis novella in which aliens arrive on Earth but make no attempt to communicate their purpose, don't respond to human overtures, and basically don't do anything interesting. After a while, the public and the news media get bored with the aliens, and only scientists trying to study them continue to pay much attention to them. Read this story if you possibly can, by the way; the narrator, a journalist who's on the commission for tenuous reasons not clear even to herself, discovers how to break through the visitors' apparent indifference. It's in Willis's collection A LOT LIKE CHRISTMAS. Great fun!

Oltion is skeptical of the likelihood of intelligent life on other planets, on the premise of the Fermi paradox, the "Where is everybody?" question. If a civilization capable of interstellar travel exists, wouldn't they have visited us or at least come within our detection range by now? This argument doesn't convince me. I can easily think of several plausible reasons why we wouldn't have been contacted by such a civilization, the most obvious being that it hasn't yet had time, or possibly sufficient motivation, to reach our cosmic neighborhood on the outskirts of the Milky Way.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Pregnant Males

Do you follow THE ORVILLE? This TV series begins as an affectionate parody of STAR TREK (even the uniforms look similar) but—as far as I can tell from reading about it and watching the first few episodes—gradually becomes more serious. One alien officer, who lives on board with his mate, belongs to an all-male species. In the second episode, he lays an egg, which hatches in the third episode. I'm not sure why he refuses to take a break from brooding the egg; doesn't his mate help? And what about an artificial incubator? Anyway, the baby turns out to be female, a rare abnormality in this species, for which the standard remedy is an immediate sex-change operation. The serious ramifications of this problem mesh incongruously with the premise of an all-male, oviparous species, which the writers apparently introduced in accordance with what the TV Tropes site calls "the Rule of Funny." In fact, an all-male species that reproduces by itself couldn't exist. The sex that produces ova is, by definition, female. To lay eggs, people of the species portrayed in THE ORVILLE would have to be either female (reproducing by parthenogenesis) or hermaphroditic. Members of an all-male species would have to breed with females of some closely related species (as some all-female types of fish can be fertilized by males of different but not too dissimilar species).

The vintage sitcom MORK AND MINDY gets away with the pregnant alien male motif by presenting it in a funny context with no attempt at a biological rationale. Mork not only becomes pregnant, he gives birth to a "baby" who looks like an old man and, conforming to the life cycle of Mork's species, ages backward.

Octavia Butler described her classic work "Bloodchild" as her "pregnant man story." Technically, the human men don't get pregnant, though. They serve as hosts for the eggs of the centipede-like aliens who've allowed the Terran colonists to settle on their planet. When the larvae hatch, the mother removes them from the host's body before they start to eat their way out—usually.

The TV program ALIEN NATION offers a serious portrayal of how a seahorse-like humanoid male pregnancy could work. The Newcomer aliens have three sexes, including a variant type of male who penetrates the female to catalyze her fertility in some unspecified process before the father inseminates her in the "usual" way. The embryo begins to develop in the female's uterus. Part-way through the pregnancy, the fetus is transferred (in a pool of water) from the female to the male, where it grows in a pouch on the man's abdomen. The baby comes out when the pouch splits open in the course of labor.

Here's a page of speculation about how a single-sex species (female) could work in terms of Earth biology:

Single-Sex Species

In Joanna Russ's classic story "When It Changed," members of the all-female population reproduce by combining ova from two different women.

In isogamy, displayed by some life-forms such as algae and fungi, all gametes have the same size and morphology and so can be considered of the "same sex," which can't technically be labeled either male or female:

Isogamy

Some Earth organisms switch reproductive methods in alternate generations between sexual and asexual reproduction (e.g., budding).

The heroine of Megan Lindholm's CLOVEN HOOVES falls in love with a satyr she thinks of as Pan. This highly unusual novel starts out as, apparently, fantasy, in which at first we can't even be sure the paranormal encounters are happening outside the heroine's mind. Eventually, however, the story becomes SF, when the satyr reveals that he belongs to an all-male species whose members reproduce by implanting clones of themselves into human women through sexual intercourse. Thus, when the heroine gives birth to her satyr baby son, he isn't biologically related to her at all.

The occasional birth of females among the alien race on THE ORVILLE suggests a possibility for the evolution of their alleged all-male species. Maybe they once reproduced alternately sexually (through ordinary mating between male and female) and asexually (by cloning). Maybe some genetic disorder caused the conception of females to cease except in rare cases. Asexual reproduction became the only remaining viable means of perpetuating the species and came to be considered the only normal way. So when the male character in that series lays an egg, he's producing a clone of himself.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Reflections on Alien Visitors

The November-December issue of SKEPTICAL INQUIRER contains three articles about UFOs and extraterrestrials.

"UFO Identification Process," by Joe Nickell and James McGaha, offers an overview of the many different phenomena that can be mistaken for alien spaceships. The authors provide a list of common "UFOs" with their most likely explanations, broken down into multiple categories with several items under each. For instance, they cite five different classifications, with examples, under "Daylight Objects/Lights" and five under "Nocturnal Lights/Objects." It's interesting to discover how many common objects and events can fool the untrained observer and even some trained observers such as pilots. This kind of material could enhance the realism of a story about a UFO sighting. If a character rules out all the typical sources of mistaken identification, his or her conclusion that an actual spaceship has appeared will seem more credible.

Eric Wojciechowski, in "UFOs: Humanoid Aliens? Why So Varied?", advances the position that the widely varied descriptions of alleged alien visitors, diverse in appearance yet strangely all anthropomorphic, make a "psychological explanation" for the reported contacts more likely than "an alien intelligence interacting with human beings." Where the previous article evaluates sightings of apparent flying objects, this one deals with "close encounters" reported by people who claim to have actually seen extraterrestrials. The author maintains that the odds are overwhelmingly against the probability that diverse intelligent species have visited Earth, that almost all of them happen to be humanoid, and that they've managed to remain hidden from mainstream attention yet have revealed themselves to random individuals. He places heavy emphasis on the "anthropomorphic yet varied" factor. Although I don't believe the alleged alien encounters actually happened (not that I've made a formal study of the topic, but those I've read about look like attempts at writing science fiction by people who know very little about SF), I don't find this author's arguments totally convincing. Diversity rather than uniformity could just as well be offered as an argument FOR the truth of the reports, suggesting that they're not merely imitations of other witnesses' accounts. Also, I can easily think of explanations for the phenomena he considers unlikely. An interstellar organization composed of multiple species from various planets might be observing us, for instance, and the reason we meet only humanoids is that humanoid species are assigned to observe worlds inhabited by races similar to themselves. The reason they're often glimpsed, yet no solid proof of their presence has turned up, might be that they want to observe us without interfering but don't mind being noticed, like Jane Goodall with the chimpanzees.

Biologist David Zeigler's ingenious article, "Those Supposed Aliens Might Be Worms," speculates on what life-forms might turn out to be most common on other planets and answers (you guessed it) "worms." He considers intelligent humanoids highly unlikely and the popular expectation of such to be a case of a "limited line of imagination." Whereas the humanoid body shape has evolved only once on our planet (all the examples we know of being closely related), wormlike creatures have developed independently multiple times and inhabit almost every available ecosystem. He lists eight different categories of worms, and this catalog isn't exhaustive.

If we found worms of some type on another planet, what are the chances of their being intelligent? It's hard to imagine them with any kind of material technology in the absence of hands, tentacles, or other manipulative organs. But are such organs essential to the evolution of intelligence as we know it? It's widely believed that dolphins have near-human intelligence, and they don't possess manipulative appendages.

Tangentially, speaking of imagination, a two-page essay in this issue titled "Why We're Susceptible to Fake News—and How to Defend Against It," by one of the magazine's editors, conflates confirmation bias and the tendency to rationalize away evidence that might disprove one's entrenched beliefs with the mind-set of childhood make-believe scenarios. According to two psychologists quoted in the essay, Mark Whitmore and Eve Whitmore (there's no mention of whether they're related to each other), childhood beliefs absorbed from one's parents are said to be reinforced "as rationalization piles on top of rationalization over the years." This unfortunate outcome is allegedly made worse by the supposed fact that "Children's learning about make-believe and mastery of it becomes the basis for more complex forms of self-deception and illusion into adulthood." Parents unwittingly teach children "that sometimes it's okay to make believe things are true, even though they know they are not." It's hard to read this egregious misconception about the nature and value of imagination without screaming in outrage. From a fairly early age, children know the difference between fantasy "pretend play" and lies. Furthermore, fans of fantasy and other kinds of speculative fiction are less vulnerable to "self-deception" in relation to their preferred reading material than fans of "realistic" fiction. Readers of novels about extravagant success or exotic romance may indulge in (usually harmless) daydreams about the prospects of such events happening in their own lives. Fans of stories about supernatural beings, alternate worlds, distant planets, or the remote future aren't likely to expect to encounter such things firsthand. In AN EXPERIMENT IN CRITICISM, C. S. Lewis labels this kind of reading "disinterested castle-building" as distinct from the normal "egoistic castle-building" of imagining one's real-life self in the position of the hero or heroine of a "realistic" novel and the pathological version of the latter, where the subject obsessively fantasizes about becoming a millionaire or winning the ideal romantic partner without making the slightest real-life effort to achieve those goals. The authorities quoted in that SKEPTICAL INQUIRER article seem to compare all fantasy play to the third category.

One more item of interest: The Romance Reviews website is holding a month-long promotional event throughout November. I'll be giving away a PDF of my story collection DAME ONYX TREASURES (fantasy and paranormal romance):

The Romance Reviews

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Thought Floating on Different Blood

I've been rereading a couple of Mercedes Lackey's Elemental Masters novels. Magicians in this series work with one of the classic four elements (air, water, earth, fire). People with those powers can see and talk with elemental creatures (sylphs, salamanders, gnomes, fauns, and many others) invisible to non-magicians. Many elemental entities have human-level intelligence; some are more intelligent and powerful than human mages. Elemental magicians, able to communicate with nonhuman creatures, must surely have a different view of the world from us ordinary mortals. People in ancient times believed in a host of intelligent beings who populated the natural realm, such as nymphs, satyrs, dryads, minor gods of rivers and mountains, dwarfs, faerie folk, trolls, etc. I suspect, however, that few ordinary people ever expected to meet one of those creatures. How different our world would be if such entities existed openly, where any of us (not just magicians) might encounter them in our daily lives.

In C. S. Lewis's PERELANDRA, the protagonist, Professor Ransom, travels to Perelandra (Venus), where he finds three intelligent species (not counting the life-form of pure spirit who rules the planet). One of his Perelandran acquaintances expresses surprise upon learning that Earth's ecosystem has only one sapient species. How can we fully understand ourselves, he wonders, if we can't compare our thoughts to "thought that floats on a different blood"? How would our view of our own species and the world we inhabit change if we weren't alone on our planet?

Although I've often wondered about a hypothetical alternate history in which other human species or subspecies, such as Neanderthals and the "hobbits," had survived to the present day, I sadly suspect that the prevailing attitude toward other races wouldn't be very different. Neanderthals and other hominids, and maybe Yeti if they existed, would look too human. They might well get treated as inferior beings, similar to the way Europeans historically treated other races, only worse, because some anthropologists might classify such hominids as "animals"—a bridge between Homo sapiens and lower species, intelligent enough to be useful but inhuman-looking enough to justify enslaving them.

Demonstrably sapient but clearly nonhuman creatures, on the other hand, would probably evoke a different response. What if we shared Earth with centaurs, merfolk, or intelligent dragons? Or the semi-civilized talking animals of Narnia? Tolkien (in his essay on fairy tales) says animal fantasies satisfy the perennial human yearning to reestablish communication with the natural world from which we've been cut off. Would a common experience of living alongside other sapient species—or extraterrestrial visitors—make human racial differences seem insignificant, as STAR TREK optimistically postulates?

The TV series ALIEN NATION explored this question in thoughtful detail. It portrayed human-on-alien prejudice and hatred, human-alien friendships and love affairs, and the mind-expanding experience of exposure to another species' view of the universe. This series about a shipload of extraterrestrial refugees settling in California, all of whose broadcast seasons and follow-up TV movies are available in DVD format, deserves multiple viewings. Also, a number of tie-in novels were published, most of which I thought were quite good. If nothing else, the fact that the Newcomers have three sexes would give them a different outlook on life from ours. The body and the senses inevitably shape the mind's perceptions of reality. An intriguing spec-fic example of "thought that floats on a different blood."

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Annihilation

Last week, I watched the rather strange SF movie ANNIHILATION. (Spoilers ahead.) An anomalous phenomenon of unknown origin, labeled the Shimmer, has mysteriously appeared in the vicinity of an isolated lighthouse. Natural laws don't seem to work normally within its area of influence, and investigators sent into the zone don't return, with one exception (the protagonist's husband, who doesn't seem to remember anything, doesn't act like himself, and falls into a coma soon after his reappearance). Furthermore, the Shimmer is expanding. The protagonist, a professor of biology, enters the zone with an all-female team of scientists and emerges alone, four months later by outside reckoning but only a couple of weeks in her subjective time. Near the end, she's attacked by an amorphous entity that takes on humanoid form, at one point becoming a double of the heroine herself.

When debriefed after her return, the protagonist speculates that the Shimmer doesn't "want" anything and may not have even been aware of her presence. During her combat with it, maybe it was only mirroring her actions. At the conclusion, when she reunites with her husband, Kane (who has regained consciousness), she asks whether he's really Kane. He replies, "I don't think so." The film leaves open the possibility that she may be a doppelganger, too, rather than her original self.

We never learn whether the Shimmer has an extraterrestrial origin or has emerged from a rupture or portal between our reality and some other dimensional plane—or spontaneously evolved on the spot. And, as mentioned above, we don't find out what its purpose is, if there's any consciousness behind it at all. While it's realistic to leave these questions unanswered, since the characters have no plausible way of discovering the truth (maybe the scientists on the project will eventually be able to get some information out of "Kane"?), I felt unsatisfied, as I usually do with a story that doesn't have a definite resolution. I want to know what or who the alien intelligence (if any) is, where it comes from, and why.

Considering the random mutations of animal and plant DNA within the Shimmer, maybe the life-form at its center (if there is one) has only the "purpose" of evolving and reproducing, with no more conscious motivation than bacteria. It spreads, proliferates, generates copies of itself, and strives to maximize its exploitation of the environment by expanding its area of control. If, as the protagonist believes, it doesn't "want" anything, blind reproduction may be its sole "motive" for invading our world. It may be an example of the adage that a hen is simply an egg's way of making another egg, or as Heinlein puts it, a zygote is a gamete's device for making other gametes. The Shimmer life-form's only chance of evolving into a stable, more advanced phase may be to duplicate the human models with which it comes into contact.

This film raises the perennial science-fictional question of identity. If the doppelganger created by the Shimmer has absorbed the "real" person's memories and obliterated the original, is the doppelganger now "really" the person? One thinks of Dr. McCoy's qualms about the transporter on STAR TREK. If each transporter event essentially disassembles the traveler at the point of origin and reconstructs him or her at the destination, has the "real" person been replaced by a succession of duplicates? In the original film of INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS, the pod people sometimes talk as if they've absorbed the selfhood of the people they replace, as when they try to convince the protagonist that he'll be happier if he surrenders to the inevitable. In ANNIHILATION, does the doppelganger of Kane represent the first stage in an alien project to replace humanity, or is he/it merely a random byproduct of the "annihilation" of the original man?

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

The Plausibility of Modern Legends

I subscribe to the magazine SKEPTICAL INQUIRER, which I highly recommend to fans and writers of SF and fantasy. Its coverage of myths, legends, and hoaxes offers lots of story seeds and can help authors ensure that their characters respond rationally to incredible events rather than acting overly gullible. The latest issue contains a review of a new book about the Loch Ness Monster. I would like to believe in the monster (alas, the only mark of its presence we saw on our one-hour Loch Ness cruise during a tour of Scotland was a steep hill where Nessie was supposed to have slid down into the lake). Everything I've read about it, though, seems to support the position that the reported sightings in modern times comprise a combination of mistaken perceptions and deliberate photographic hoaxes. That a breeding population of large animals could survive in a confined area with no physical evidence being found after decades of searching does seem unlikely. (If the monster weren't a natural animal but an intelligent, magical creature, as in Jean Lorrah's Nessie series, that would be a different matter.)

Bigfoot (which I'd also love to believe in) seems more plausible. If Sasquatches existed, they'd be a small breeding population of a near-extinct species of primate, a very few individuals living in a vast tract of millions of acres of forest in the Pacific Northwest. There's nothing inherently unlikely about their existence being real but unproven, since they would have a strong motivation to remain hidden.

On the other hand, while I certainly believe life exists elsewhere in the universe, I reluctantly disbelieve all UFO "evidence" I've read about. Sightings and photographs have been convincingly debunked. As for the personal narratives of face-to-face contact and abductions, they sound like attempts at writing science fiction by people who don't know much of anything about science fiction. They don't make sense in terms of motivation. If aliens advanced enough to travel here from other stars wanted to make contact with us, maybe to pass on their wisdom and save us from extinction, wouldn't they reveal themselves openly to people in a position to change the world? Would beings of superior intelligence and unimaginably powerful technology make contact with an alien planet by grabbing random inhabitants whose reports are certain to be disbelieved? And if the aliens wanted to observe us without being noticed, they'd surely have the ability to do so.

Now, maybe they're observing us and don't care about remaining unseen. Maybe they're gradually accustoming us to their presence, like Jane Goodall with the chimpanzees. In that case, though, the alleged abductions don't make sense; the events as reported couldn't be telling the aliens anything about us they don't already know.

Slightly more plausible motivations: Earth is under galactic quarantine; visits to our solar system are forbidden under the alien equivalent of the Prime Directive. The briefly, ambiguously glimpsed craft in the sighting reports aren't supposed to be here. They're interstellar smugglers or other shady characters taking refuge from pursuit in a forbidden zone. As for the abductions, if they actually happened, I can think of only one credible explanation—the aliens are just messing with our heads. Either the rogue visitors are playing random pranks in a spirit of cruel fun, or extraterrestrial scientists are conducting psychological experiments on us inferior beings to find out how our culture will interpret this irrational behavior on the part of superior entities.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Undersea Aliens

Peter Godfrey-Smith, a professor at the University of Sydney and City University of New York, believes the octopus is the closest thing to an alien living on Earth with us. Octopuses "are the most complex animal with the most distant common ancestor to humans."

Octopus Intelligence

In many ways, octopuses seem as different from us as an advanced creature can be and evolve on the same planet. They have three hearts and blue, copper-based blood. They have the ability to change color, which they use for camouflage. Suppose we encountered an extraterrestrial species of intelligent cephalopods who communicated by waves of colors? We would have to learn a whole new mode of language. Octopuses "developed eyes, limbs, and brains via a completely separate route" from us. With neurons distributed through their bodies instead of solely localized in their heads, we might say they have brains in their arms. They show considerable intelligence, such as in escaping from confinement, and they can tell human individuals apart. Octopuses seem to play, another sign of high intelligence. They also display curiosity, which Godfrey-Smith thinks may be evidence of subjective consciousness. If so, consciousness has appeared separately at least twice on Earth.

It has been suggested that a possible reason why they haven't evolved even higher intelligence springs from their reproductive cycle. Male octopuses typically die soon after mating, and females don't live long past the hatching of their offspring. Therefore, adults don't survive to pass on knowledge and skills to their young. Octopuses can't have much of a culture, if any. Their solitary lifestyle (aside from mating) is probably another factor, since gregarious species tend to be more intelligent than solitary ones; interactions with other members of one's species in a group require mental flexibility.

Godfrey-Smith makes the optimistic assumption that the evolution of consciousness at least twice on Earth implies consciousness isn't a rare fluke, but a potentially common natural development. That assumption, if valid, bodes well for the discovery of sapient beings elsewhere in the universe. If a race of giant octopuses on another planet—perhaps one mainly or entirely covered by water—overcame the disadvantages of their short, solitary lives, maybe by evolving a long-lived, asexual caste responsible for the care and education of the young, they could create something we would recognize as a culture.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Depiction Part 26 - Depicting Humanity by Jacqueline Lichtenberg

Depiction

Part 26

Depicting Humanity

by

Jacqueline Lichtenberg 

Previous parts of the Depiction series are listed here:

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2015/04/index-to-depiction-series-by-jacqueline.html

Well, now we're turning into Spring (Northern Earth Hemisphere) and the world is pretty much in a lot of trouble.  It's a mess.

So, how do writers of Alien Romance "depict" such a multi-leveled mess?

One of my favorite pastimes is to "explain" human behavior (individual behavior and mass behavior) to non-humans.

I've noticed something on TV News lately -- after the shift to interviewers asking only "leading questions" (never any real questions, only telling the interviewee what to say next), we now have almost every person "interviewed" as a talking head using a tone of voice that is either whining or condescending.

What do we mean by "whining" -- well, it's that tone of voice that projects "pleading" to understand what I'm saying.  It has an underlying texture of "complaint" to it, a whine for you to change your mind.  This is what a child does when parents say, "No."  They come back with, "But, you don't get it!"

What do we mean by condescending?  It's that tone you now hear on almost all voice-overs for commercials that are "telling" (not showing or arguing) you why you need to buy this product or service.  It's the way a parent talks to a child who just isn't old enough to understand complicated things.

So TV voices are using tones (in American English) that are either child-to-dense-minded-parent, or adult-to-incapable-child.

It has been a long time since I've heard the tune or underlying voice song behind words that indicates adult to adult communication.

I heard adult-to-adult in a short clip from some Trump Administration folks talking to the media, then it was gone.

The stark contrast between adult-to-adult tones and child-to-adult whining and adult-to-child "sweet-kind-condescension" just blows you away if you notice it.

So listen for it in the daily news clips you run across.  It is not in the words, but in the melody behind the words.  The tones are most easily spotted when the song does not match the words, the information behind conveyed.

There is an "announcer" song -- which has in it a flaw I've spotted where a word is emphasized by a pause afterward, wholly inappropriate for the grammatical flow of the sentence.

If you tune out the words and just listen to that underlying song you will notice how the song is chosen to affect the emotional response to the words.  The words require one sort of response, but the tone is urging (pleading for) another emotional response, usually an inappropriate one.

This analysis of how people talk, rather than of what they say, is one thing you'd have to explain in depth and in detail to a Vulcan, or any other non-human.  Suppose you are introducing an Alien, a First Contact Situation, to this world we are suffering through today.  What would you say to this Alien, and what TONE OF VOICE (song behind the words) would you use?

There is a rule in public speaking that I've seen disobeyed consistently, and then gradually expunged from our TV Voices (talking heads).  That rule is, "Never Uptalk."

Uptalk is a song where assertions are inflected with an upward tone, as if asking a question when finishing a declarative sentence.  It is common in Southern USA dialects, and if you move from North to South, you will pick it up without noticing.

Uptalk is passive-aggressive -- since you aren't actually saying something is so, but rather asking, you can't be countered.  You take the weaker position in the exchange, and as the weaker you can't be attacked or the other person is a bully.  Passive-aggressive.

How do you explain Uptalk to an Alien?

By tone of voice and facial expressions, humans convey vast amounts of information separately from the denotation of words.  If the three channels of communication carry conflicting messages, we often conclude the human is lying.  If the channels carry the same, harmonious, information, we believe the information is true, or at least the person is honest.

How do we tell if an Alien is lying?

More interesting -- how does an Alien tell if we are lying?  And how do you explain to an Alien that since all the humans know this person is lying, it is OK -- everyone knows what he "really means."

By matching the words, tone of voice, and body language (whether the smile reaches the eyes, and other tiny signals), we figure out what we think about what is being said.

Thinking requires concentrated effort.  Generally speaking, people are too busy exhausting themselves on daily tasks, chores, and life-or-death-decisions (like how to pay for health care).  Just staying even takes all our strength.

So living in today's world, we may pause to figure out what a news item means, or which news anchors are lying, or what interviews are 'canned' (rigged, scripted).  It's hard work trying to sort out which of the 3 streams of information you get from television (words, tone, body language) is the true one, and which are the lies.

So once a human has figured our what "the truth" is, they paste a label on that truth and try very hard not to revisit that decision because all subsequent decisions will have to be changed, too.

Most people want to be honest with themselves (at least), even politicians, but don't especially value being completely honest with all other people.  We select who to be "honest with" -- and that is a kind of intimacy called "being close."

Politicians do that.  They hold one, personal and private position, sometimes sharing it with other elected politicians of similar rank, and a totally different position publicly, a position crafted to get votes.

Thus if there is a "hack" of a private communication (such as an email) which reveals the private position, and how it differs from the public position, the public often stands aghast.  Then things settle down, and the public slaps a label on the individual whose private position was revealed.  The problem is just that one person, not all politicians.  And you tell the difference by the labels.

In fact, the whole commercial industry is based on labeling -- a type of labeling called "branding."

If you want to buy a GM car, you want it to have a GM label on it somewhere.  If you want Dole pineapple, you want to see the Dole logo.

Why do you want certain brands of an item, but not other brands?

Shortcut thinking.  Radio, TV, Magazine, media advertising methods use that "tone of voice" plastered over words that do not match to engrave on your mind that this Brand is better than that Brand.  And it might actually be better.  You never know until you try it, yet when you try it, your preconceived notions may color your tasting experience.

Labels matter when they are shared among humans.  Labels, short-cut-thinking, accepting the opinion of others who "know better" is learned in childhood.  At some point you are expected to mature, to shed the thought habits of childhood, and "think for yourself."  But thinking is hard work, so after you've thought, you do not want to re-think.  So you slap a label on your conclusion and move on with the business of survival.

Explain that mental shortcut I'm calling "Labeling" to the Alien you are falling in love with.  Can you understand his explanation of how his people use shortcut thinking, labeling, whining, condescension and Uptalk?  Do they even have an equivalent?

As an example of an emotionally charged yet completely abstract (i.e. thematic) element in Depicting Humanity, consider political science, philosophy, and history.

Modern record keeping is allowing us to revisit and rethink Labels invented about a hundred years ago, more or less.  Printing has allowed even minor works to be preserved.  Historians study these records, as do journalists, and often exhume Labels invented to cover certain cultural Idea Bundles that were "sold" to whole communities in the past.

Explaining individual behavior to Aliens is easy compared to explaining our mass movements, shifting cultural norms, and vicious arguments over what the facts were, and what those facts have now become.

Yes, as part of the labeling shortcuts human cognition uses, we change the "values" of the facts as time progresses.

Labels used in short-cut thinking are like the X, Y, W, symbols used in algebra -- they stand-for-something rather than be that something.  So we can manipulate labels the way we manipulate terms in algebra -- it is abstract thinking, and the kind of Aliens you could plausibly use in a Science Fiction Romance would very likely use this type of thinking.

Assemble a group of Ideas under a Label, (say X, for example) then juxtapose that group of ideas to a different group (say Y, for example).  Then try to find a relationship between them that holds through time -- perhaps requiring the invention of another Label or Symbol called W.

For humans, I expect this systematic explanation of human belief systems is impossible.  Humans as a group, (it seems to me) will fight any process that threatens to reveal the truth about their behavior.  We love and admire irrationality as a method of tricking our most dire foes.

Thus, definitions of Labels used historically change -- I expect in a 20 year cycle, and an 80 year cycle.

Academics, today, are struggling to redefine and clarify the Label "Fascist" -- I've seen at least 5 mutually exclusive definitions bandied about on social media, often with legitimate academic credentials attached.

Since these definitions usually come in cold text only, there is no tone of voice or body language to analyze, just words.

We have equally shapeless, whipped cream type Labels being shouted about - Liberal, Conservative, Religions, Atheist, etc.  (e.g. Zuckerberg suddenly came out with the statement that he now sees Religion as important last year, and some instantly speculated he's planning to run for public office.)

Journalists and Academics (often with identical credentials) are trying to Group the beliefs and tenets under sharply contrasting Labels, so they can call them X, Y, W and manipulate them before your eyes.

You can't make this stuff up, but maybe you can explain it to a visiting Alien just discovering humanity.  If you can get this point across, you may hit the best seller list because people will talk  (shout, argue, get red in the face, and cry inconsolably) about your novel.

You hit an emotional core response when you rip Labels apart and re-arrange what those labels stand for.  Imagine the disruption when a packaged food your family relies on is under botulism recall!  Now imagine if a Label you are absolutely sure of is "recalled" and re-formulated.  Explain to your Alien Character just how disruptive his people arriving on this planet will be to our nice, neat, reliable labeling system.

As an example, or perhaps inspiration in how to go about writing an explanation of human short-cut thinking and what happens to us when our short-cuts are disrupted, read this article all the way through.

You already know the information in this article -- Donald Trump is a Populist.  But there are dozens of definitions of Populist going around, some from serious academics, all mutually exclusive.  Historically, the Label Fascist is being redefined, reorganizing a Group of behaviors some of which were evident in Italy, and some not.

Don't worry about deciding which Label is accurate and applies to whom.  Read carefully with an eye to explaining to your Alien Character how humans use (and abuse) Labeling as a cognitive process.

This is a difficult exercise.  I warn you, the article will make you fume and stomp, maybe shout and snap at anyone who talks to you for the next day.

While you read, remember that "right-wing" means the opposite in Europe than it does in the USA, and it means something entirely different in the Middle East (explain THAT to your Alien).  I have no idea what "right-wing" might mean in China but I'm betting the meaning does not resemble anything I've ever heard of.

The point of this exercise is to gain the kind of perspective on humanity that Gene Roddenberry had when he invented "Number One" (the emotionless female) and Spock (the half-human Alien), then combined the two Characters.

Roddenberry was fascinated by "emotion" -- actually explored it from another angle in a failed pilot he made where a human being was from a culture where the worst invective was to Label something Inconvenient.

Because he was interested in how humans were affected by Emotion, he created a Character who "had no emotions" (we know he walked that back later, due to the exigencies of commercialized fiction).

That's what you can do with this exercise.  Create an Alien who has NO LABELS -- who does not understand the cognitive shortcut we use when we apply Labels (or Branding).

If you can succeed in reading this (explosive) article without blowing your top, you may be able to create such a Character who will haunt readers for generations.

http://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2017/1/3/14154300/fascist-populist-trump-democracy

Donald Trump isn’t a fascist
A leading expert on 1930s-era politics explains that Trump is a right-wing populist, not a fascist — and the distinction matters.
Updated by Sheri Berman  Jan 3, 2017, 1:00pm EST

Of course, an expert must know what they're talking about.  Would your Alien assume she did?

Pay particular attention to the article section:
Four key characteristics of fascism (not in evidence in Trumpism)

Note the contrast with Liberalism.  Maybe you thought you were a Conservative?

All of these labels are tossed about in this article as if they are "real" -- as if everyone agrees on the definitions.  Nothing could be further from the truth.

Note also that the "four characteristics" are treated independent variables.  There is no thematic connection among them (as would be required in a novel).

If you have one of the four variables, that does not mean that you have the other three.  The other three are not generated by the one -- not consequential.

What if your Alien's psychology could not encompass a notion of thinking beings functioning in such cognitive chaos?

Explain how humans can believe contradictory things.

Given that humans do believe contradictory things, why should the Galactic Community accept humans as intelligent?

You might also want to explain to your Alien Character how Fascism, as defined by this article (or maybe some other articles about it) differs from government by Aristocracy.

How is a Dictator different from a King?

A King controls life or death over individual citizens, is the chief justice of the supreme court, is the speaker of the house, and the president pro-tem of the senate, as well as the superior to every corporation's CEO.  In fact, a King is CEO of all the businesses in his Land.  The King owns all the Land and grants tenancy to Dukes etc.  The King can revoke tenancy of anyone at any time (if he can get away with it politically).

So how do Fascists differ from Kings?

We write a lot about historical times when Kings ruled, and we have projected the Aristocratic model of government into Fantasy, and even Galactic Civilizations.

We also use the constitutional monarchy model in Galactic Civilization - is that Fascist?

Suppose your Alien objects to your explanation, "But the role of government is to protect the individual from government!"

Do you answer with the ancient wisdom of humanity that without the strong hand of government, humans would eat each other alive?  Humans misbehave if nobody tells them what to do.

So read
http://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2017/1/3/14154300/fascist-populist-trump-democracy

if it's still available - or if not, Google fascism and see what you find as a definition, then explain it to your Alien.

In that explanation you come up with, you will find your Alien Romance Theme -- and you will find what barrier Love must Conquer to forge your human/Alien couple.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

The Importance Of Being.... Allergic?

I'm on vacation, so will have to rely on memory (which may or may not be fuzzy).

On my Facebook page today, I've had a wide ranging conversation with Elysa and Erin that started with the discrimination, bullying, exclusion, and contempt that children with very serious allergies face in school and in society today.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/08/17/kids-nut-allergy-teased-excluded_n_929809.html?icid=maing-grid7%7Cmain5%7Cdl7%7Csec3_lnk2%7C87417

From there, we touched on the possible effects on fantasy novel Vampires if they had the bad taste to
bite a person with allergies. Elysa's thoughts turned to a self-medicated allergy sufferer.

I did some research on the internet, and discovered that it might be very amusing to afflict the Vamp with uncontrollable itching. Unusual levels of histamine can do that, I read (I hasten to add).

http://www.allergyescape.com/allergy-medication.html

Now, here's my fuzzy bit. I know that I remember seeing somewhere that just as anti-histamines dull the brain, histamines sharpen it. 

Off topic thought, more suitable to be put into the minds of one of my arrogant aliens. Maybe there would be less AD if there were less self-medicating, and less use of Benadryl and its like by parents for their own social convenience.

I've also read that allergies happen when the body's defenses make a mistake, and preemptively attack something that is not a threat.

And, I'm sure I remember reading, probably in DISCOVER magazine, that we are constantly evolving and mutating, but not all mutations are timely or successful. However, there might come a time when a small group of people who have suffered and been sigmatized all their lives for one allergy or another might save the human race.

Maybe, like the appendix in our guts (which used to be cavaliery removed because doctors did not know what it was for) the allergic among us will be the source of a serum or antibody or antidote.

Meanwhile, it would be really nice to know that while FEMA is stockpiling supplies in the expectation of another disaster, that they have catered (literally) for the one in one hundred citizens who suffer serious, life-threatening food allergies.

Dog Training For Alien Characterization

My beach reads this summer included "It's Me Or The Dog" by Victoria Stilwell. I wasn't far into the book when I saw the potential for alien romance writing inspiration.

Dogs have different abilities and some of their senses are much better than ours. Take the sense of smell and the logic of sniffing, for instance. Dogs perceive events and behaviour differently. Just as a romance hero alien would.

In one passage of the book, Victoria Stilwell recounts what most humans think if they see a dog joyfully rolling in the grass. We (humans) anthropomorphise. We assume that the dog is enjoying the sort of experience that we would enjoy, if we rubbed our spines against fragrant, cool grass. In fact, wild dogs use scent the way human deer hunters dress up in camouflage. The dog is blending in, disguising his scent.

As I think about sniffing, and the useful social information dogs glean from where other dogs have "been", it occurs to me that a sexually lonely alien with dog-like senses would probably find the Ladies section of public toilets irresistible. What a great source of conflict!

One potentially hilarious part of the book discusses the qualities of leadership that are appreciated by dogs. These qualities include the ability (of the leader) to project happiness, also aloofness, also calm authority. What fun it would be to assess some of the world's most prominent politicians as if we were dogs!

Be warned, "It's Me Or The Dog" contains some very sad stories of how differently humans view dog behaviour and motivation, and how badly these misunderstandings can play out for the dog. It is certainly a thought-provoking tome, and I recommend it... not just to alien romance writers.

What color is purple?

Watching the Oscars, I was mildly dismayed to see one of presenter Anne Hathaway's gowns described as "purple". I suppose that it was as purple and a purple finch in mating season... but I'd describe that color as dark red... and I might liken it to sun dried tomato.

Monitor resolution can make a major difference, but even though I looked at two TVs side by side with very different color settings, the dress in question was nowhere near the color range that I was taught was purple.

It's the same with my website (http://www.rowenacherry.com). I think it is washed-out purple... a dusty, bloom-on-a-black-grape purple. My webmaster calls the color "blue".

The color I call "Royal Blue" is called purple by some, also.

The thing is, how does anyone really know that anyone else is seeing the same color that one is seeing?
I look at a fuchsia. Unfortunately, its petals are two different shades of purple.... to me: a deep blue-pink, and a reddish violet blue.

I call the predominant color "fuchsia", but am I at odds with the world? It would seem that I am!
Can two people look at the same flower, and see different colors? Or do they see the same colors but give them different names?

Color blindness is a problem in the air force. My father was color blind. He couldn't perceive the difference between red and green. It's surprising he didn't have trouble with traffic lights, isn't it?

Would using a numerical reference help? Every color on the internet does have a number, doesn't it? At least, if we all agreed that we liked #RGB 53, 28, 117  (that may not actually be a color number), we'd all be looking at the same color, even if we saw it differently.

If everyone everywhere (as long as they used our alpha-numeric symbols) learned that #RGB 53, 28, 117
was the color they saw when they looked at #RGB 53, 28, 117 would the language of color be more accurate than it is now?

Does it matter? It might... to scientists, or to computer programmers involved in cloaking technology. A nuance of color might be critical in the diagnosis of an alien rash.


Red is a range of shades. So is green. Think of all the greens in nature! There are hunter-gatherer cultures where the females, who pick wild berries, have an exceptionally large vocabulary of different names for all the different shades of blue. As I recall, the males have a lot of names for the various hues of red.

Look at this cool site: http://www.colourlovers.com/community

This colour-lover has a great range of blues! http://www.colourlovers.com/palette/526002/1.....2....3.....4..

The problem with writing a science fiction in which futuristic or alien characters said #RGB 53, 28, 117 instead a color name is that the author would have to translate at least once, and the reader might find the code pretentious or annoying.

On the other hand, using codes might be a logical progression, given our American readers' fondness for acronyms and texting.

I was chatting (recording a radio program) with the incredibly witty and wild Jeff Strand yesterday, and also with Blake Crouch whose tersely titled new e-book RUN is just out. Jeff Strand admitted that his long and quirky titles, such as Graverobbers Wanted (No Experience Necessary) do not show up well in Kindle sized thumbnails. Jeff suggested that he might simply use the ASIN as his title for his next e-book.

Since I am primarily a Romance author, I made incredulous noises. Jeff and Blake assured me that the average Horror reader is highly intelligent, obsessively numerate, and likely to memorize ISBNs for the coolness of it.

Next time I create a geeky, alien hero, I'll have to think about that!