UFOs…
Congress recently held hearings on UFOs, and the Pentagon informed the politicians about the authenticity of two videos (in the Director of Naval Intelligence’s testimony, to be specific). Are UFOs a national security concern? Are ETs real?
In Sing a Zamba Galactica, #2 in the “Chaos Chronicles Trilogy,” two ET civilizations meet, one ours (when Humans are out there living in space, they’re obviously ETs) and another stranger one. This begins a strange collaboration between two intelligences, Humans and Rangers (the reason for the latter’s name is part of the fun); in other words, that was Humans discovering friendly ETs. In the same novel, Humans meet a group of nasty, unfriendly ones. Out of the chaos (not “the Chaos” of the first novel, Survivors of the Chaos), ITUIP is born—the Interstellar Trade Union of Independent Planets, something akin to an EU in the cosmos).
Isaac Asimov, one of my sci-fi-author heroes, didn’t put ETs in his Foundation trilogy; I have them in my trilogy, and in many other stories, from the novella “Escape from Earth” (available as a free PDF download—see my “Free Stuff & Contests” web page for this and other free fiction samples) and other short fiction works (the Dr. Carlos stories and Rogue Planet continue the ITUIP saga) to other novels like A. B. Carolan’s The Secret of the Urns and Mind Games and my More than Human: The Mensa Contagion.
While we’re also ETs in a sense of Sing a Zamba Galactica, our ancestors are the ETs in A. B. Carolan’s Origins. (Maybe Asimov would like that?) Humans from the stars returning to Earth is a common theme in the sci-fi literature—I first saw that theme in Chad Oliver’s Winds of Time. The original Battlestar Galactica TV series had that theme as well. (It was short on special effects but much better than the second version.) I used it in “Escape from Earth,” and A.B. used it in Origins. The later novel, though, takes the concept of Battlestar Galactica and adds to it the recently discovered Denisovans, a primitive offshoot of Homo sapiens’ evolutionary tree. The “real” ETs in that novel become only a mechanism for carrying Denisovans to the stars, something like poachers capturing animals in the wild for zoos.
Whether ETs or UFOs are real or not (I’m inclined to believe the former rather than the latter, unless certain foundations of physics become meaningless), they will continue to capture readers’ imaginations and motivate sci-fi storytellers.
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Celtic Chronicles. This ninth novel in the “Esther Brookstone Art Detective” series. Esther and Bastiann volunteer to work at an archaeological dig near their modest castle outside Edinburgh. A student also working there is murdered. Police Scotland finds a Russian oligarch’s number on the lad’s call-list. That Russian is on his yacht anchored off the Scottish coast. As the investigation continues, everything becomes more complex, other characters come into play, and the intrigue and suspense increase. Published 5/23 by Draft2Digital, this ebook will soon be available wherever quality ebooks are sold (just not on Amazon). Note that #6 and #7 are free PDF downloads (see my “Free Stuff & Contests” web page for those novels and other free fiction).
Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!
