Tag Archive for: Science Fiction

In an online forum, someone asked which types of science fiction books “hook” me.

I’ve always been fascinated by stories that allude to long-dead civilizations with superior technology. I think it’s fair to say that I’m hooked by them, and with a clear conscience, I’d list most of them as some of The Best Science Fiction Books.

Almost immediately, Lord of a Thousand Suns came to mind as an example. Poul Anderson wrote it in 1951, and it’s one of my all-time favorites. Anderson is in the pantheon of Sci-Fi writers, and I especially loved his early stuff.

Lord of a Thousand Suns is narrated by a soldier who fought in an interstellar war between Earth and Janya, one of its successful colonies. The Janyards occupied the Sagittarius constellation, and by carving out their settlements under those pitiless alien suns, they lost some of their humanity. For the sake of mankind, their defeat in the war with the home world was imperative. Be that as it may, Earth teetered on the brink of surrender until the momentum dramatically and unexpectedly turned.

Just prior to the war, humanity as a whole discovered a planet that they dubbed New Egypt, because it had architectural relics reminiscent of the Nile Valley kingdom. But that’s where the similarity ended.

New Egypt had been known as Vwyrdda many millennia ago, and it had a humanoid population. They were like gods! Their empire controlled a good chunk of the galaxy with superscience. Whole star systems shuddered at their wrath, because their suns could be blotted out if they displeased the mighty Vwyrddans.

Our soldier/narrator, on the side of a nearly-defeated Earth, snuck onto Vwyrdda behind enemy lines, to try to find something to turn the tide of the war. He was discovered and chased into the bowels of one of their labs.

With his apprehension imminent, he took a desperate gamble.

Donning a helmet and pulling a switch per the illustrative icons on a panel, he’d hoped to learn some game-changing military secret. Instead, he lost consciousness.

I won’t spoil the ending; but to answer the original query, these types of sci-fi tales featuring an ancient technologically superior civilization will definitely hook me in. I’ve read a lot of them. So as I drafted up this answer, I wondered if their influence creeps into my own creative writing. After some rumination I’m forced to admit that hell yes, they have!

Not even aware of that during the writing, I dreamt up my own prehistoric star empire. Vertropicus came about as a population of human time-travelers settled in the Cretaceous, continued to progress, and expanded into the galaxy. And like Vwyrdda, their reign lasted millions of years.

Vertropicus serves as a backdrop for a sci-fi series set in the present, featuring the recurring character Cord Devlin. It’s been great fun hinting at this long-dead empire, à la Lord of a Thousand Suns — one of The Best Science Fiction Books.

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The movie Blade Runner was based on the short story Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, published in 1968 by important science-fiction author Philip K. Dick. The film deviated from the original story, but even if you hadn’t read it, the movie’s plot stands on its own.

It takes place in a dark future on Earth, though mankind has achieved off-world colonies. To help pave the way for more colonization, replicants are created to do the hard jobs, including soldiering. These human copies, however, are not androids made of circuits and hard drives; they are biological contrivances that are indistinguishable from normal humans … at least in most ways.

They differ in strength, reflexes, and most importantly, a drastically reduced lifespan. Their lives are so short that they don’t have time to develop normal emotional responses. It’s how one can determine whether or not they’re human. The Voight-Kampff Test is a method to reveal replicants masquerading as humans.

Why would replicants try to pass themselves off as human? For their freedom. When you’re a replicant, you’re created for a specific task — all you’re ever allowed to do in your short existence. You’re treated like a machine, with no choice and no rights.

When a replicant rebels and goes missing, they are immediately marked for retirement — another way of saying “terminated” in the permanent sense.  Blade Runners are what they call the people who track them down and kill them.

Rick Deckard, played by Harrison Ford, was a Blade Runner. In the movie, he is coerced back into the profession for a last job. Reluctantly, he accepts an assignment to retire four replicants who have escaped off-world and have come to Earth.

The replicants’ leader is Roy Batty, played by Rutger Hauer — and he is particularly dangerous. He has all the physical advantages of a replicant, and he is at least as brilliant as the scientists who created him. Plus, he’s ruthless in his quest to find a way to extend his life. He leaves a trail of bodies, up to and including Dr. Tyrell, the head of the giant corporation that makes replicants. When Tyrell convinces him that nothing can be done to save him, Batty kills him in a gruesome scene by crushing Tyrell’s head in his hands.

 

*Spoiler Alert*

 

In the end, Deckard has dispatched all but Roy, but the last replicant has Deckard at an extreme disadvantage. Our hero is dangling by a rain-soaked beam at the feet of Batty several stories above the street, and he’s losing his grip. Roy watches dispassionately as his antagonist faces certain death.

“Quite an experience to live in fear, isn’t it? That’s what it is to be a slave,” chides Roy.

            Without his companions, and resigned to his own imminent demise, one would think the last bit of satisfaction Roy would get from life would be to see his pursuer fall to his death. But as Deckard’s last finger slips off the beam, Roy shockingly saves him. With one hand, he grabs Deckard’s wrist in midair and hauls him back over the side of the building.

Roy then sits cross-legged next to the puzzled Deckard, who is still afraid of what the replicant might do. That’s when Roy makes the speech that will forever haunt me, and color my perception of the film — and I’m pretty sure it’s not the message that the producers intended for moviegoers to come away with.

But hold that thought for a moment.

Rick Deckard is the main character of the story. He’s also its first-person narrator. When he lays there in the rain after being rescued by the now-expiring Roy Batty, he tries to make sense of it with the following voiceover:

I don’t know why he saved my life.

Maybe in those last moments, he loved life more than he ever had before.

Not just his life; anybody’s life. My life.

And that’s the message I believe we were supposed to come away with. An entreaty to live the fullest life we can in the time we have. It’s a worthwhile message, to be sure.

But the thing that fires my imagination most is what Roy said to Deckard just before he died:

I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe.

Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion.

I watched C-beams glitter in the darkness at Tannhauser Gate.

All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.

 

I definitely experienced a sense of regret. The off-world wonders that he described to Deckard made me long for those kinds of experiences. This living being, created only to die after a short while so that humans can be spared a dangerous but adventurous existence, is sad.

We are left to only imagine his experiences, but perhaps that lent them that much more mystique. In any case, for me, the movie may as well have ended right there. The followup scenes, where Deckard is running away with a young replicant named Rachael, played by Sean Young, are anticlimactic.

What impacted you most about the movie?

 

The End

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The hero uses his encyclopedic knowledge of Classic Trek as freelance intelligence operative.

Ghosts of Forgotten Empires Vol l

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In college, I rediscovered recreational reading when I learned to buy books that appealed to me instead of my English teachers. A friend suggested the book that kicked off this newfound hobby: War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy. No, wait; that’s not right. What was it? Oh yes, it was Conan the Barbarian by Robert E. Howard.

Okay, the exploits of Howard’s hero may not be as highbrow as War and Peace, but for some reason this book spoke to me like no other. I inhabited the main character, Conan, as he strode across a prehistoric Europe in a loincloth, sandals, and broadsword.

The society was like medieval Europe — but thousands of years before there was a medieval Europe. At the time of the stories, Europe featured a dry, desertlike Mediterranean basin — and the British Isles were connected to the continent.

There was sorcery, political intrigue, piracy, gods, and a hero who didn’t hew to the values of so-called civilization. He was a brute, but an intelligent one — equally comfortable in the roles of mercenary, thief, pirate, general, and even king.

I was sad when I read the last book in the series, but my appetite had been whetted for other material.

 

I went on to read different genres including thriller, political science, mystery, history, non-fiction, sports, and my favorite: science fiction. I read several notable series, with perhaps my favorites being The Foundation by Isaac Asimov; Berserkers by Fred Saberhagen; The Many Colored Land by Julian May; and a two-book set called Galactic Empires.

Galactic Empires is a special case. It’s a wondrous anthology of short stories written between 1941 and 1975. I’ve read them several times, and they always recall the fun and wonder I felt when I first discovered science fiction as a boy.

 

One of my favorite stories in Volume One is titled Protected Species by H. B. Fyfe. Imagine a vast construction project: to build a city on an alien shore. It had homes, administration buildings, and a dam a few miles upstream on a nearby river. It had all of the things necessary to support a human society. And it’s trillions of miles from Earth.

But the most awe-inspiring thing is that it’s being built next to the ruins of some long- absent race. Our hero, Jeff Otis, visits to inspect the construction, but he also becomes curious about the abandoned city. Cliffs had risen, and the course of the river had changed since the ancient city thrived; but whoever built it had chosen the location for the same reasons the current builders did. Proximity to the narrow bay and the freshwater river, among other things, made it an ideal location.

Some bored construction workers found sport in chasing some of the local animals, including skinny, gray apelike creatures. Jeff disapproves, but he begrudgingly accepts that the men need a diversion. He’s aghast, however, to find one of the apes stuffed and mounted. The animals looked enough like earth apes that he wondered if a travesty had been perpetrated on a semi-intelligent creature. Armed with speculation that the ruined city could’ve been built by these creatures’ ancestors, he issues an order to “protect the species.”

Just before he departs, Jeff decides to explore the ruins for a second time. Upon entering a chamber, he’s surprised to find himself face-to-face with one of the gray apes, who speaks to him in English. Otis is thunderstruck, but he eventually engages the alien and learns that the apes — called Myrbii — are not native to the planet. The Myrbi adds that he’s glad that humans are coming back to their old planets, and he regrets what happened between their two races long ago.

You see, the ruins are not Myrb; they’re human.

Wow! What a payoff to the mystery of the ruins! We learn from an alien that there was a spacefaring human civilization on Earth tens of thousands of years ago — and that it was nearly blasted to extinction in an interstellar war with these Myrbii.

They have since monitored humanity, and noted Jeff’s recent order to protect the species of gray apes. Based on this, they decided that Jeff was the best person to contact with the news that they, too, had issued a protect-the-species order. In their case, however, it was for the protection of mankind after both races fought a war several millennia ago.

That kind of impact ending isn’t common — particularly in modern Sci-Fi. That’s why I cherish books that make me go wow! They inspire me to deliver the same kind of experience to my readers.

The End

For a limited time, visitors to my new website will get a free download of

Ghosts of Forgotten Empires.

The main character, Cord Devlin, uses his fanboy knowledge of Star Trek to help U.S. Intelligence deal with otherworldly threats.

Ghosts of Forgotten Empires Vol l

It’s available in any of the formats below at https://michaeljfoy.com/.