Kate says… Tragedy opens the story. Thousands are placed into stasis as a colony ship begins its journey, but the Caretaker who will watch over operations during the decades-long journey dies suddenly, and the ship’s AI decides the last person awake, Ethan, must take his place. He’s not trained for this, and worse – he’ll be an old man or possibly dead by the time his beloved wife awakens at their new planet.
A few years into his lonesome existence, the ship unexpectedly awakens a woman who shouldn’t be on board at all. Ethan finally has company, and she’s an engineer who knows the systems. They discover something is terribly wrong. The ship has nearly reached its destination, and it’s not a colony planet or a happy new life. Quite the opposite.
The pace picks up as the story expands into the alien world, where Ethan finds enemies and allies on the strange planet.
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One fascinating aspect of the story is Ethan’s specialty. He’s a linguist who studies an alien language with strange written symbols like hieroglyphs, but made by Spirograph. So it seems. Many of the symbols are presented in the text. The story doesn’t hand-wave communications with aliens away, but relies on Ethan’s years of study.
Space presents a lot of challenges to an author. It’s so incredibly huge. Planets are so far apart, and if humans did encounter aliens, would they ever understand each other? Wormholes, time machines, and universal translators provide the techno-magic that usually hops us over these obstacles and allows a story to proceed at a satisfactory pace. Science fiction readers are so used to these tropes (artistic metaphors) that we barely register the departure from reality (and current science points to such conveniences as pretty much impossible.)
My own new release, a science fiction fantasy tale of a new world that’s deadly to human colonists, challenges them with a pre-industrial race of aliens. I tackle the communications problem by giving an artificial intelligence decades of observations from hundreds of tiny drones equipped with audio-visual sensors to create a translation algorithm. That happens “off-stage” as the saying goes, so the characters can talk with each other – mostly. Skip the tedious part that real-life would demand and get on with the story! Did I do a good job? Read the book now, in Kindle Unlimited, Kindle, or print, and judge for yourself.
A journey to a new world. An unexpected indigenous culture. Two reluctant leaders desperate to save both their people.
Trey Jackson yearns for purpose. Burdened by guilt over his lover’s death four decades prior, the old pilot languishes in a small community fearful of exploring the planet they colonized. But he’s inspired by a fresh-faced teen studying native whales… and shocked when their research raft gets dragged by one of the creatures to the aliens’ shore.
When Jackson seeks an alien Seer’s help returning to the colony, he triggers a dangerous chain of events. The indigenous alien is struggling to stop a violent chieftain from launching murderous raids on her homeland. Can the tired old man could be the hero they all need…
Check out both of these books and contrast how they deal with humans communicating with aliens. What do you think?
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Tags: colonization science fiction, aliens, spaceship, first contact
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