Seeing through other eyes

One of the major reasons why we write is to make sense of the human world.  But science fiction writers know that sometimes the best way to comment on human culture and behaviour is to see it through other eyes.

Choosing to narrate a story from a viewpoint other than human can shake us up and get us to question and challenge the way things are in our own world. In my youg adult novel Geneship I have a race of intelligent big cats with language, culture, and history.  They are clearly as intelligent as the human research team, yet their young have been exploited by humans in inhumane ways.  in that book one of the viewpoints is that of an alien leader, who gets to comment on human society.

In my Panthera books I returned to one of my favourite themes, artificial intelligence.  I combined it with my favourite animals, big cats, and have a sentient AI in cat form.  Pan is great for observing human culture. He notes that we put our best security where we have our stuff, and he wonders why we amass so much stuff when we all die and leave it behind.

In my short story The Scent of Other Lives (in my short story collection Otherlives) the trees are sentient planimals that can move their branches and communicate In a simple way with the humans who come to their world.  They save my human hero from a flood by flexing their branches and lifting his skimmer up into its branches until the waters recede.  

In my novel Snowbird I created Sponges.  They are organic pebble-like structures living on the surface of a dusty Mars-like planet.  They are a group-mind, linked together by threads.  And they've been there for many years.  But now humans have come along and want to terraform their world.

The increasingly intelligent AIs we are creating might end up doing more than just maintaining our tech,  they might end up running it, deciding what content goes on there and what doesn't.  Perhaps it will be AIs who eradicate pornography from the internet, guardian AIs who hunt it down and delete it.

Other eyes can be organic or manufactured.  They can be the eyes of animals or a house, or even the "eyes" of a black cloud.  Switching viewpoints away from humans can be a powerful device for challenging and examining our culture.

The ordinary hero

My writing friend Charlie Cochrane was recently blogging about the ordinary hero.  I thought it was such an interesting idea that I'm thinking about ordinary heroes and  heroines myself is morning.

In the SF world, most of the books I admire have ordinary heroes/heroines. C J Cherryh's The Pride of Chanur has a tradeship captain totally upending interstellar politics when she picks up a fugitive character.  What I like about Pyanfar is that's he's often scared stiff, she knows defying the alien Juf might get her and all her species killed, but still she defies them.

In Elizabeth Moon's Vatta' war series, Kylara Vatta is a disgraced Spaceforce cadet forced to become a civilian ship captain.  Out of necessity, she creates a space defence force against dangerous pirates, and rises to command the Spaceforce that kicked her out.

In YA SF, ordinary heroes and heroines are commonplace.  In Kathy Reichs' viral series ordinary teenagers foil illegal  viral experimentation, stop bombers, save the research institute that is their home.

In Teri Terry's Slated books the heroine is a girl who thinks she is ordinary who has been made extraordinary by government forces.  In Sarah Crossan's Breathe it is teenagers who uncover the secrets of their world and change things.

I especially like these YA heroes and heroines because they aren't traditionally powerful.  They're young people thrust into the midst of often intolerable situations who know they must act.

In my own books, my own ordinary heroines include Jian Kabana, the main character in Snowbird, who uncovers illegal terraforming and corruption on a large scale.  In Panthera : Death Spiral and Panthera : Death Song it is up to wildlife conservationist Ren Hunter to save the natural world from major abuse.  In my novel Jade, the sentient planet is defended from exploitation by Kaath, a civilian survey crew member.  All of these characters are ordinary people thrust out of their everyday lives by extraordinary circumstances.

Ordinary characters are people I can connect with.  There's an element of "there but for the grace of God go I" about them.  And I often winder if I would have their strength of character and their sheer determination to see things through if I was thrust into a similar situation.

It's never enough

Watching the news, the underlying theme of a lot of the reports is that there's never enough of something.  On any day there are dozens of pressure groups all saying that not enough money is being given to this or that cause.  Or not enough action is being taken to tackle some problem. There's not enough change in a situation, or it's not happening fast enough.

Watching the news shows what a cantankerous, dissatisfied species humans are.  We fight wars because we don't have enough land, or enough of some precious resource that the other guy owns.  We never have enough money, or enough stuff.

Part of this drive for more is an intellectualised form of Darwin's "survival of the fittest" idea.  If we have that bright shiny spaceship, that planet full of resources, then maybe we'll be shown as the fittest and she'll choose us.  Like bower birds, males amass the interstellar equivalent of bright plumage and a dazzling home with beautiful flowers in it, in the hope of attracting a female,

I wonder how we'd react if we ever found a species that had a concept of "enough".  Perhaps their laws would limit the amount of money or credit they could own.  Perhaps anything they earn over a set level gets automatically redirected to help the less wealthy.  How would that affect their culture?  Would their companies be admired for the most ecologically sound manufacturing techniques instead of the size of their bottom lines? 

The retail sector would be vastly different without the drive for constant conspicuous consumption.  And what about the way they choose their mates?  If the equivalent of having a shiny red sports car doesn't draw in the females, then what does?  Kindness?  Wisdom?  Mental strength?  

A species that had enough would have very different drives from humans.  My only worry is what would happen if humans discovered them.  It could well prove that their life of enough wouldn't be enough to keep humans at bay.

The plague

 This week it's been announced that scientists have brought back to life a 30,000 year old virus thawed out from the Arctic permafrost.  Their goal was to see what could happen if the Arctic ice melts and all the other dormant viruses there were returned to life.

We only think of viruses when we have a bad cold, but delving back into the role of viruses in the history of the Earth and humans brings some interesting insights. We already have a problem combating ever-mutating 'flu strains.  It's not too big a stretch to imagine a newly-awaked Arctic virus that infects the birds that migrate there.  When those birds go south on their winter migration, they take the virus with them to a completely new set of animals.  Perhaps our domestic herd beasts contract the virus, and then it's passed on to their human herders...

For those of us who believe in the Gaia hypothesis, this kind of mechanism would be an ideal way for the beleaguered Earth to thin out the numbers of the human pest that is overrunning its surface.  Perhaps the next apocalypse will come before we run out of food or water, but be carried by tiny biting insects.

Our gathering together closely in cities makes it much easier for viruses to spread from host to host.  But we could get the opposite effect too.  If the citizens of a large continent evolved an immunity to a major disease, anyone moving in to conquer them from elsewhere would be likely to be attacked by the disease and the invasion would probably fail.

That happened to Napoleon's army in 1802 when it invaded Haiti.  His troops were decimated by yellow fever, a disease that mosquitoes transmit.

Assault team commanders might think twice before sending teams down to alien worlds.  The mightiest army is capable of being killed by the tiniest creature.

The lessons of history

If we want to write about an advanced, intelligent species the only role model we have at present is our own.  Human beings are a deeply flawed species with a turbulent and violent past, and digging into our history provides us with the basis of many stories.

Most writers think of mining our social history and culture for stores, but I think that looking at how we've changed and affected the natural world, and how it in turn has changed our history, is a rich source of ideas.

The genetic modification of wild wheat and rice has provided the food supplies that have allowed our population to boom.  An unscrupulous scientist adding chemicals to a staple food like this might well have the basis for a form of mind control. 

The co-evolution of species with us has given us domesticated dogs, horses, cattle, and sheep.  Domesticated cattle and sheep allowed us to become sedentary farmers.  We lost our nomadic roots and became settled in one place.  And eventually gathered together in vast cities across the globe.

But when we domesticated wheat and rice we narrowed down the hundreds of wild species into a few super-producing strains.  The problem with monocultures is that, if they become susceptible to disease, you have a lot of people starving very quickly.  Perhaps the heroine of an SF story might be the keeper of the Millenium Seed Bank, defending the precious seeds from raiders and culturing new species that save the planet from starvation.

Or if you want to control a species, how about getting it addicted to sugar?  Consuming high levels of sugar decreases dopamine in the brain.  And dopamine is linked to the ability to learn.  Dumb them down with sugar, then conquer them.

Or you might also write about what happens when the billions of cattle we have today contribute so much to greenhouse gases that we have to slaughter them all.

This just scratches the surface of ideas from human history.  Looking at cultural and social history alongside corresponding ecological changes can provide us with an endless stream of situations for stories.

Primal Earth

If we're looking for exotic flora and fauna to people our SFF worlds with, the best place to start looking is on Earth.

During our planet's development it has had very different atmospheres to the one we breathe today, thicker, and containing elements we would find toxic.  And there were all sorts of exotic creatures and plants that don't exist today that we could use as models for alien worlds.

How about twelve metre high fungi forests?  Earth had these around 350 million years ago.  When they were ready to reproduce other creatures would have to keep well out of the way of these huge fruiting bodies as they exploded into the air.

Or how about trees that have retained the earliest mechanism for photosynthesising, scales all up their stems?  A forest with scale-laden trees would look very different from the dense canopy of photosynthesising green leaves that we know today.

Or perhaps your world is dominated by giant ferns that suck up all the carbon dioxide in its atmosphere. You'd better plan for the onset of the next ice age then.  Or maybe the inhabitants of a world threatened with a runaway greenhouse effect would grow giant ferns to stop that disaster.

At many periods during its development our Earth has looked radically different from the way it does today.  Maybe the dinosaurs didn't die out on another world.  I wonder what kind of civilisation they would have produced.

Reproduction

I've been reading a book about the evolution of key species that changed the world, and one of the things that struck me was the variety of methods for producing offspring.

It's a salutary lesson for sex-obsessed humans to reflect that this isn't the only way to reproduce the species.  There is the phenomenon of parthenogenesis.  Some species are self-fertile and don't need a male to reproduce at all.  Now there's a feminist motif if ever I saw one.

Some species lay eggs, and some of those are soft and laid in water.  Some land species worked out a way to keep the essential fluids the embryo needs when they made their move onto land.  They lay eggs with hard shells that protect the growing young from the weather and desiccation.  Eggs contain their own food supply, and are a brilliant invention.

There are birds that hatch eggs at different intervals, and some where the younger siblings are eaten by the older, stronger ones.  And then there's oophagy.  The live young hatch inside their mother and the biggest eat the smallest.

Looking at the animal kingdom is a great way to challenge human sex-centred culture.  How will we deal with an alien species where infanticide is common and accepted?  Where children aren't worshipped as they are in our current society.  Is this the ultimate expression of Darwin's "survival of the fittest"?  Perhaps this produces a more robust species than humans, one that would out-compete us.

There's nothing like looking to the animal kingdom to challenge the human-centric way we see the world.  Maybe the aliens we meet might be parthenogenic females practising oophagy.  That would give the lie to the idea of the weaker sex.