Image by Stefan Keller from Pixabay
Talking to aliens is not my bag. I could never write a science fiction novel because I would fall at the first hurdle. How the heck do you communicate?
I mean, I’ve tried. Two thousand words in and I was tearing my hair out trying to pick my way through that multi-dimensional minefield. (The alien was an interstellar traveller who had landed mistakenly in the upper reaches of the Thames in Oxfordshire. He was also a giant octopus.)
The sad thing is that I love science fiction. Adore the television series. See the movies several times. Read lots and lots of it. Recommend it with enthusiasm, including to people who recoil from the very idea.
A propos, try the novella The Seven Brides-to-Be of Generalissimo Vlad by Victoria Goddard. It’s a cracker.
Well, it’s on the cusp of science fiction and fantasy, I suppose. The author is best known for her epic fantasy series set in the Universe of the Nine Worlds, full of strangeness and moral challenges.
But the Generalissimo is a heck of whirl. Constructed like a fairy tale, plotted like true mystery, it has great world building, a fabulous brave and sassy narrator who makes me laugh, and a real lump-in-the-throat ending.
But in the universe of the Generalissimo everyone speaks the same language, even though they sometimes use electronic devices to disguise their voices. Nobody is actually talking to aliens.
