Science Fiction
Yes, of course here be little green men. But not only these. Extraterrestrial life can and sometimes should be almost unrecognizable. Luminaries from Carl Sagan to Madonna have noted that the odds against humanity being the only sentient form of life are astronomical. Yet, as noted in the Fermi paradox, there seem to be no signs of aliens in reality. (Of course, with the recent discoveries of many hundreds of planets orbiting other stars, perhaps that will change. Stay tuned to your favorite science fact websites.) Science fiction writers have stepped into the void, providing entertainment, humor, and cautionary tales. Here are those that have appeared in Daily Science Fiction:
We expected them to be better at it. The aliens. You've only got to go to the movies to know that we expected explosions, telepathy, ray guns. We thought it would be something drawn-out and gruesome, or maybe quick and painless. But either way--big.
The invasion looked bad in the beginning. On the first night, we saw weird damn flashes in the sky over the gulch, and the sound of the ships made lightning crawl across my shoulders. Earth's cities took some damage, but it didn't make much sense. They went for bridges and highway overpasses.
I heard you got a cat. I heard you named him Charles. I guess you didn't know that I do cats too?
I played all those games you wanted, all those black-blond-red-brown-bald-headed strangers. But you never said you wanted a cat. I could have done that too.
Jane woke Kim.
"You were dreaming," Jane whispered from the top bunk. "Twitching."
I visit your planet from time to time, but it really is too painful.
My race is immortal now, and our client races are immortal, too, or have transcended bodily form and exist in virtual realms, which is immortality by another route.
She had my teeth. I hadn't expected to recognize myself in her, but when she greeted me, her maroon lips parting into a crescent, there they were. My teeth. White, flat, and surprisingly human.
I forced myself to look into her too large eyes as her warm, seven-fingered hand wrapped around mine. Black with purple specks, like a neon vision of the night sky, the almond-shaped organs took up the greater part of her face and were irrevocably her father's.
Beth was breaking down book boxes in the backroom on the day he left. She ran her box cutter down taped seams, split the tape with slashing strokes that ran into the cardboard, ran through the corrugation, frayed bits of brown into fringe.
She had thought she would not see him again. Thought he would return to his home a billion miles away and never say goodbye. Leave her to her own decisions.
Sometime after sunset on a blustery evening in late summer, with the offworlders' orbital station a small bright misshapen moon over the choppy water of the river and the glittering barges of the loyal rich fighting at their moorings, a slim girl came skipping over Westminster Bridge like a leaf carried on the wind. She danced down Belvedere Road, her pale face bobbing though the crowds, and ducked into the alley beside the bookies.
In a ground floor apartment, Melinda watched her Dad, Brian Johnson, former cop, rush from monitor to monitor, press a button here, enter a code there, as he followed the girl from street to street. "She thinks she's won," he said. "If she thinks at all."
The first time I saw the artwork of a knid, I was twenty-five. By that time, I had grown used to them, seeing them standing alone at a bus stop, a small cleared out circle around them; watching them sitting by themselves in the park contemplating ants or trees or the paint peeling on a bench. The stooped, fragile little creatures had grown more prevalent in those days, but were still fairly rare, even in the larger cities.
I had spoken to one once, and of course, "spoken to" is the right phrase, since they don't speak back. It was at a college party, one I was too old to be at. The knid was there as some kind of joke among frat brothers, and when I was drunk enough to approach it as it huddled in a back corner, I asked it how it felt about that. It turned its eyes to me and nodded its head, as they do. I smiled at it, and it waved its mouth tentacles lightly in what I took to be a friendly gesture.
Our home always smelled like blood.
My father spent his days among meat and his nights ensconced in the aromatic mist of it. We lived above the shop--he and me, Mother and my sister Fennel--in three small rooms built of knotted pine, boards stained in the colors of our livelihood.
I go to the grave after the service on Sundays. I leave Cal with Florence, our neighbor, and walk the dusty trail up the hill alone. It's ok because Cal enjoys the time with Florence; she plays games with him much better than I can. I'm not, I guess, that kind of father. My old man was the same, no less loving but emotion didn't come easily to either of us. You might, if you wanted to make something of it, call us both distant.
I just suppose it rubbed off on me.
Sally blamed the drill bit stuck in her tooth.
She didn't blame the dentist. It happened sometimes. The tiny little bit broke and got stuck. Nothing for it but to fill the gap and go on. If her roots were thin and twisted, it wasn't his fault.
They say you never see the one that kills you. But they might have been referring to weapons fire in an open battlefield, not a plasma charge on a crowded lunar tube.
He sits facing me, and the way he's looking me right in the eye, I have a feeling this will be the end. With the close proximity, I'll see his green hand reach for it, concealed beneath his double-breasted, razor-sharp pressed suit.
Marcia was super pissed. Who the hell do they think they are? She stormed into her bedroom to get dressed.
She tugged on a pair of jeans, which wasn't easy since she hadn't really taken the time to dry off. The sweater she slipped into instantly became damp around the neckline because of her uncombed wet hair. She cursed and decided to call Randy.
Emjid was thrilled to be using human eyes. As he pushed his cart down the aisle, he turned his head to the left--a joy with a twistable neck--and savored the red of tomato-paste cans. What fun!
"Excuse me, sir."
Dr. Arroyo sighs. It's over. NASA has shut down, SETI has folded, the donors have forgotten the cause, the computers are out of date, the telescopes are old and broken. The decades of silence had defeated his mission.
How many billions of dollars had SETI spend over his lifetime, searching the sky for something, anything, some little sign that they're out there? All of Dr. Arroyo's life was spent listening for a sign of extraterrestrial intelligence in the vast universe. His career was looking to the sky and pleading, "Speak to us. Please, just one bleep of signal. We're waiting."
"I'm sorry, I just don't think you're right for the part."
Michael Poksi shuffled the resume in front of him to the bottom of a large pile of resumes, the result of a disappointing casting day. He stared at his watch and sighed. 5:45. If the train was not running late, he might just get to see the last ten minutes of the game. His team was probably losing, it was a bad season, but that was all the more reason they needed his moral support.
It was my turn to wear the mask, but my egg-sister Linney wouldn't give it up. She'd been wearing the mask all morning, set on Smile, and it was a test day, too. Everyone thought she was so pleased and relaxed and Earthy.
I am wretched at tests, but the mask would have helped. I flunked my Calm test that morning, scored medium low on Earth Facial Expressions, and got a fifty in grooming because I didn't know how to put on makeup. The mask has its own. Maybe I depend on that too much, even though I only get to wear the mask half the time I'm awake.
Stella Laine, deputy head of Human Resources, tented her fingers, looked me in the eye, and said, "Your time on Earth is nearly up, Benjamin."
For a couple seconds I couldn't stop blinking. Finally I got my eyelids back under conscious control, and, with what I thought was a heroic lack of quaver to my voice, I said, "Do you really have that kind of power?"
Beneath the oldest rainforest in the world, Bakti walked quiet as a jungle cat. Three more hours to check his traps before nightfall. Ndari, equally stealthy, accompanied him. Bakti had warned her it was too dangerous, but her green eyes sparkled at the challenge.
"Why?" she had asked. "Why more dangerous for me than you? I'm just as swift as you. My eyes and ears just as good, and I'm better with a rifle at fifty meters."
I've learned a few things since my first race with the Martian. I learned clothes are nothing but extra weight. I strip off my shirt and kick off my skirt until I'm standing, shivering, in my skivvies. They used to be pink, only having been passed down through three sisters has turned them grey, and my Nana says that's what happens when stuff gets old whether it's panties or people.
Lan Delson skipped out to watch the race. He sits at the top of the hill with his elbows on his knees, waiting. I spy my kid sister thinking she's smart, hiding behind a tree, leaving her shadow stretched in plain sight. The other kids would just have to hear about it later, I guess.
I've decided to blame the aliens for the way my petunias died without blooming this year.
Everyone blames them for something. The business journals blame their disinterest in trade for the length of this recession; the financial community is supposed to be in shock over the fact that Earth isn't "galactically competitive." The Catholic Church blames them for the precipitous drop-off in Mass attendance.
He wore her heart on his sleeve.
It was where he kept all of his trophies. Stitched into the ceremonial garment that proclaimed him Gar-rag the Victor. He had seven now; seven life organs from seven species from seven planets. Seven was lucky, he knew that too, and he held himself with more than his usual pride.
When Bjorn and his fellows were selected to supply context for the alien overlords who kept insisting they were just there for the Earth's own protection, he'd expected something different. Warriors in exo-skeletons, four limbs with a laser in each, maybe machine intelligences with scalpel-like fingers.
Instead, he found, they were soft.
Saturday night was scheduled to be our game night. Except that nobody ever told me the schedule. My son was unfolding the Monopoly board. My wife claimed that we had talked this through days ago. I claimed that I'd been more preoccupied than usual, which was the truth. I explained to both of them that I couldn't play just now. JB was waiting for my call, and this was important. My son ignored me, sorting money and cards into neat piles, while my wife stared at me in that special way of hers.
"Give me five minutes," I begged.
The plains rolled out before Aiesha, all buffalo grass and forever sky drowning to the dusk's easy light. Aiesha sat on the weather-worn porch of her grandpa's farm house, flipping page after page of her history textbook--unread, the words blurring to elsewhere. Away! they whispered. Go! they sighed.
Despite this urge, Aiesha knew she was stuck. Might as well sink her boots through the porch's half-rotten planks and never move again.
Our alien overlords meant us no harm.
I understand the frustration and resentment that this sentiment will no doubt inspire.
We listen to the spidersong. The spiders are far away, just at the edge of our senses, whispering a haunting and beautiful melody into our minds. The grown-ups are oblivious, as always. They are having several conversations at once around the campfire, laughing and gossiping. It's a nuisance because we can't enjoy the spidersong nearly as well, not with all the distraction. We use a reliable trick--we have Sheila ask for a story.
Sheila is the youngest and she hates to speak using words even more than the rest of us, but we nudge her along, and she tugs on old Jens' coat. He is only too happy to oblige. Kids and grown-ups alike gather around the fire. Everyone else quiets down and settles in to listen to Jens.
A giant silver ship burst though the Great Blue Dome and hurtled toward the earth. There was an explosion that shook the ground.
The native found her in the wreckage. He prodded her with his foot. She whimpered, so he squatted down to watch until she coughed and sat up. He tried the signal for friendship, but her eyes narrowed and she struggled to stand. Back a few paces, he squatted again, curious. Her hair was very long. He liked that. None of his kind had hair so long. It was a sign of great beauty. Her skin was a strange color. Not the same as his, but not offensive to behold. And her eyes were the color of the sky in contrast to his own, which were the normal deep red.
Destiny drove him forward like a taskmaster from the bus, up the grand entranceway into the ballroom at the Civic Centre, past the sign-in table where he received his laminates and loot bag, onward to his publisher's booth in a back corner. There it was: the fabled anthology, bright with colour but creepy enough to grab his attention. He picked up a copy to examine it closely, saw his name on the cover, third from the top, felt a surge of satisfaction. His first sale as an author.
"Do you like science fiction?"
Another battle had been decided in humanity's favor; another system reclaimed from the Squids. Another tiny pseudopod now extruded outward from the amorphous boundary that marked where human territory left off and Squid territory began.
Similar victories had been coming with such speed and frequency that, for the first time in living memory, there were hopeful whispers of an end to the generations-long stalemate and a final victory for humanity.
Five days after my mother dies, I push her into the ocean. Her body is a darker blue than mine, iridescent and nearly purple. Her carapace is brittle, and it shatters beneath the force of the waves. Her body breaks down into a coarse grit that washes up onto the shimmering blue sand of the beach.
My mother's ghost is easy to find, for she had one leg shorter than the other five, which gave her an odd way of scuttling. I spot her quickly, dancing in the sea foam where the water meets the sand.
Roger swiveled his chair to gaze out his study window, half-seeing his wife's garden bloom into spring, relishing the down time. The doorbell rang and Roger smiled, listening to his wife Ann plead to their ten-year-old son to quit stomping down the stairs three at a time. Five minutes later, Mike Watson, Roger's boss at the National Reconnaissance Office, walked into the study, shutting the door behind him. Roger noted with disgust Mike's bulging attaché case.
"No way, Mike, this is my first weekend off in over three months."
Aliens
Yes, of course here be little green men. But not only these. Extraterrestrial life can and sometimes should be almost unrecognizable. Luminaries from Carl Sagan to Madonna have noted that the odds against humanity being the only sentient form of life are astronomical. Yet, as noted in the Fermi paradox, there seem to be no signs of aliens in reality. (Of course, with the recent discoveries of many hundreds of planets orbiting other stars, perhaps that will change. Stay tuned to your favorite science fact websites.) Science fiction writers have stepped into the void, providing entertainment, humor, and cautionary tales. Here are those that have appeared in Daily Science Fiction:
by Cassie Beasley
Published on Jan 8, 2013
by M. Bennardo
Published on Feb 20, 2013
by Keyan Bowes
“Feathers? What do you mean, feathers?” Kate asked her co-worker, taking a bite of her honey-ham sandwich. “Aren’t you eating? We’re due back in fifteen.”
The spring breeze blew Nelli’s hair into her face, and she brushed it away impatiently.
Published on Oct 19, 2010
by Jacob A. Boyd
Published on Mar 17, 2011
by Eric Brown
Published on Jan 30, 2012
by Krystal Claxton
Published on May 31, 2012
by Tina Connolly
Published on Dec 12, 2011
by Colin P. Davies
Published on Feb 1, 2013
by John Parke Davis
Published on Jun 24, 2011
by Seth DeHaan
Published on Nov 30, 2011
by Nicky Drayden
Seven security gargoyles stare at me from atop the elaborate sandstone columns lining the casino’s walls. Their sharp eyes and oversized talons flex ever so slightly in anticipation of snatching up cheaters like unsuspecting prey. They’ve moved closer since I first sat down at this slot machine, the only place in the casino that hadn’t had line-of-sight thanks to a fortunate arrangement of overgrown palm fronds and the gritty haze from a gaggle of feathered Gwiffahs smoking silvawax from a hookah. But the gargoyles have been swarming to my location ever since my machine passed 87,000 kalax, its blinking lights and wailing sirens announcing my winnings to the entire casino.
Published on Nov 10, 2010
by Paul Ebbs
Published on Jun 19, 2012
by Karina Fabian
Published on Jan 11, 2011
by Milo James Fowler
Published on Oct 26, 2011
by Susan Franceschina
Published on Jan 9, 2012
by Anne Patterson Friedman
Published on Dec 16, 2010
by William Greeley
Published on Dec 22, 2011
by Alexandra Grunberg
Published on Jan 9, 2013
by Colin Harvey
Garcia met her at the entrance to the network of tunnels running beneath the radioactive remains of the Pentagon.
"Major Sparrow." Garcia offered his hand. "Thanks for coming all the way from Huntsville."
Published on Sep 13, 2010
by Nina Kiriki Hoffman
Published on Sep 8, 2011
by Patrick Johanneson
Published on Aug 3, 2011
by Steven Kahn
Published on Nov 15, 2012
by D.K. Latta
"Picture this: an astronaut arrives on another world, searching for mineral resources. There's an unanticipated snag. Specifically, the exhaust from his stabilizers destroys the crops of a local farm lord. The astronaut did not anticipate encountering inhabitants, and is improperly trained for the encounter. Words are exchanged (through translation devices, of course), tempers flare, and the earth astronaut utters what is construed as a challenge. The farm lord has him placed at the base of a volcano, knowing that molten rock will pour over him. The air is thick with sulphur and radiation levels are beyond human tolerance. What does he do?"
Edward shifts slightly in his chair. "The whole thing seems a bit farfetched, don't you think? After all, it was an accident. Hey, is that it? The correct answer? The whole scenario is invalid because it's based on a false premise?"
Published on Nov 17, 2010
by Brian K Lowe
He went on and on while we all stared at the picture on the TV. I thought it looked just like when Klaatu landed in that old movie, "The Day the Earth Stood Still," the black-and-white one. I thought, "Grinpa would like this," because he was the one who watched that movie with me on cable. Then I remembered his fallen-in face, with his eyes closed, on his hospital pillow.
Published on Oct 11, 2010
by Sadie Mattox
Published on Dec 24, 2012
by Mario Milosevic
Pardon me for my impertinence. I do not wish to impugn or malign anyone on this committee. I appreciate your considerable hospitality towards me and my family. How are they, by the way?
Published on Nov 1, 2010
by Lisa Nohealani Morton
Published on Jun 1, 2012
by Samantha Murray
Published on Oct 15, 2012
by Jez Patterson
"We have to smother it on all over. Otherwise he'll dry out. Think of it like human babies weaning onto solids. They can't produce their own mucus until they're three years old. The dependency helps reinforce the bond between child and... Moira? Are you alright?"
"I can't do this, Geoff. I mean... look at me." Her sleeves were rolled up, but Lyam's baby-gloop was dribbling down her forearms as she held her hands out from her sides like a surgeon ready to operate but who'd overdone it on the disinfectant hand gel. Geoff laughed.
Published on May 2, 2013
by Cat Rambo
Published on Mar 28, 2013
by Robert Reed
Published on Feb 3, 2012
by Jason Sanford
Published on Apr 1, 2011
by Katherine Heath Shaeffer
Published on Jun 5, 2012
by Alex Shvartsman
Published on Oct 17, 2011
by Marge Simon
Published on Dec 1, 2011
by Steve Stanton
Published on Feb 7, 2011
by Desmond Warzel
Published on Mar 4, 2011
by Rebecca Adams Wright
***Editor's Warning: Even Humor can be disturbing, and for adults only***
Published on Jan 14, 2013
by Caroline M Yoachim
Published on Oct 8, 2012
by Ree Young
A simple story about hobos and the kind-hearted strangers they find along their path.
Published on Sep 8, 2010
by k. b. dalai
Published on Apr 22, 2013
