Hykonians (Tomorrow News Network: A to Z)

Hello, friends!  For this year’s A to Z Challenge, I’m telling you a little more about the universe of my upcoming Sci-Fi adventure series, Tomorrow News Network.  In today’s post, H is for:

HYKONIANS

Much like Mr. Cognis, the cyborg who’s addicted to emotions, the Hykonians are an idea that I salvaged from one of my old, abandoned manuscripts.  Actually, they appear in more than one of my old manuscripts.  You see, the Hykonians and I… we have a long history.

As a small child, I was already a space adventurer.  Sometimes I’d recruit other kids on the playground to be my crew.  The jungle gym was our spaceship, and we had to defend Earth from evil space aliens.  And what were those evil space aliens called?  They were called Hykonians, of course!  I have no idea how I came up with that name.  It just sounded right.

As I transitioned from playing on jungle gyms to writing my own stories and drawing my own comic books, the Hykonians continued to serve as my go-to bad guys.  They abducted humans for their evil experiments.  They hurled planet crusher missiles at Earth.  And when I started writing about time travel, the Hykonians were first in line to steal my hero and heroine’s time machine.

In science fiction, alien species often fit into easy categories.  You’ll find a warrior race or a logical race or a spiritually transcendent race or a race that’s obsessed with social media or a race that cannot understand the concept of love.  But because the Hykonians have been so many things in so many stories, I have a hard time pinning them down in that way.

In one story, I made them highly religious to the point of superstitious.  In another, they were led by a technocratic form of government that rejected anything but pure scientific fact.  They were an egalitarian culture, sometimes; but in one story I started exploring racial divisions in their society, with certain Hykonians jokingly calling themselves “High-konians” while others were referred to as “Low-konians.”  Also, at one point I wanted the Hykonians to be totally asexual.  Now they have four genders, and translating Hykonian pronouns into English is a huge problem.

So when I write about the Hykonians in Tomorrow News Network, I intend to honor everything that they’ve been in all those old stories.  Does that make Hykonian culture messy and confusing?  Yes.  Yes it does.  It’s just like human culture in that way.

In Tomorrow News Network, the border of the Hykonian Hegemonic Empire is only a few lightyears away from Earth.  The Hykonians are effectively our next door neighbors.  And they’d be friendly neighbors, except that things sort of got off on the wrong foot between our two species.  Thus, the Hykonians do not approve of us Earthlings.

And unfortunately, we Earthlings have good reason to keep our guard up against them.

Next time on Tomorrow News Network: A to Z, anything that travels faster than light must also travel backwards through time.