Happy New Year, everyone. I hope that 2026 is a great year for you all.
There’s one thing that I, in all my Sci-Fi writing, have so far kept away from writing much about.
Aliens. Their existence, form and humanity’s interaction with them.
Whether you want to think of them as little green men, grey extra-terrestrials making crop circles or anything else, apart from a few references to alien technology in the Dave Travise Universe, and a couple of short stories, I’ve never paid them much attention in my work.
Until now.
It’s not that I don’t believe in their existence, somewhere out there. After all, there’s plenty of room for them. And, given the age of the universe, it’s quite possible that they would be far in advance of us in so many ways.
Such as in their ability to travel through space, and in everything else that makes an advanced society.
Even given such things as the Fermi paradox, I’m pretty sure that they exist. More than that, if they can travel interstellar distances, I believe that they would have developed as a civilisation that has outgrown the urge for conquest and destruction. After all, if they can traverse the stars, why would they want to annihilate us?
I find it hard to accept that we would pose a threat to them, or that planet Earth is the only place in the whole of the Galaxy where they can get something they need to survive, necessitating our destruction.
Of course, another possibility exists, that they exist and we are more advanced than they are. If that’s the case, then we may come upon them when we advance enough to head out into space and visit them ourselves.
I digress.
The main reason that I haven’t involved myself with aliens is that I was worried about doing them justice. I suppose you could say that I wasn’t sure I could make them alien enough. And not just in the physical sense, I was just as concerned with their mental condition.
I was finding it hard to put myself in their place and see things as they would. Or even imagine how an alien might think or act in any given situation.
If I made them too much like us, it seemed to be a bit of a cop-out, almost as if they wouldn’t have been alien enough to justify the label.
It would be very easy to ascribe human emotions to aliens, but that wouldn’t necessarily be realistic. It was conceivable that the aliens might have problems of their own. It made me wonder what the alien equivalent of humanity was.
If they had been able to develop to the point where they had conquered space, then they had to be capable of working collectively, for a common purpose. Like we do, sometimes.
Perhaps they weren’t that different to us after all?
I thought about convergent evolution, which is where species evolve to look roughly the same, based on their place of origin having similar factors which would affect their development.
That meant it was entirely possible that aliens would breathe gases, be subject to gravity and the other laws of physics, possess arms and legs, eyes and ears.
After all, they’ve evolved into quite efficient tools, capable of amazing things.
Would that also mean they would possess the same kind of thoughts and emotions, such as empathy, compassion, and understanding, in their social groupings?
But then I saw that I was overthinking it. The inside of the mind of an alien could be anything I wanted it to be. They would no doubt be confident in their own motivation, all I had to do was convey that.
In the same way as you have a blank page when it comes to creating a setting, you have complete freedom to make your aliens however you want them to be.
That meant problems could arise with both of us judging each other by our apparent standards or first impressions. With closed minds, unwilling to see and accept differing points of view.
Which could be a fatal error.
At this point, it all got quite heavy. But it threw up the idea for a story.
Anyhow, I’ve taken the plunge, so to speak, and started writing a first contact story. It opens with a disaster. I’ve tried to make it a bit more cheerful than a conquering race type of first contact, because I firmly believe, as I said before, that the more capable of travelling between the stars a civilisation becomes, the more it will have outgrown ideas of conquest.
The action doesn’t directly involve Earth at all. It takes place on an obscure planet in use by humans and aliens, on an alien ship and on the alien homeworld.
The Collective might be published later this year.
And there is another possibility regarding aliens, one that has just occurred to me. It’s still swirling around in my head. I can’t really put it into words until it firms up, but when it does, I’ll tell you all about it.
It also means that there’s another potential novel to add to the list.
If you want to know more about anything to do with my writing, just drop me a comment. Until next time,
Happy reading.
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