Hello, friends! Welcome to this month’s meeting of the Insecure Writer’s Support Group, a blog hop created by Alex J. Cavanaugh and co-hosted this month by Kate Larkindale, Diane Burton, Janet Alcorn, and Shannon Lawrence. To learn more about this amazingly supportive group, click here.
As you’ve probably heard by now, the U.S. Congress recently held hearings about Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (U.A.P.s), which are more commonly known as Unidentified Flying Objects (U.F.O.s). There was some… let’s say “interesting” testimony in that hearing. Now I don’t know if anyone will find this IWSG post relatable, even a little bit, but U.F.O.s make me feel deeply insecure about my writing.
I’ve always been obsessed with space, and there was a time in my life, long ago, when that obsession included an obsession with U.F.O.s. I believed U.F.O.s were real. I was convinced that aliens were here, visiting Earth, possibly studying us the way we study dolphins or gorillas. It was only a matter of time, I thought, before the truth finally came out. Many times, I’d see something on the news or read something on the Internet that would get my hopes up. Every single time, my hopes would be disappointed.
Today, I am much more skeptical. Admittedly, a congressional hearing is a little different than previous U.F.O.-related news stories, but I’m not getting my hopes up. Not anymore. Maybe American pilots are seeing strange, hard to explain things in the sky, but lots of strange things happen on this planet without aliens getting involved. At this point, unless stronger evidence is made public, I’m inclined to believe that that congressional hearing had more to do with Chinese spy balloons than anything like an extraterrestrial intelligence.
However, watching the congressional U.F.O. hearing did trigger this weird insecurity of mine, as a Sci-Fi writer. What if, at some point in the near future, we do discover alien life? The moment probably won’t involve a flying saucer landing on the White House lawn. More likely, it’ll be the detection of weird gases in the atmosphere of some distant exoplanet, or maybe we’ll find a suspicious mix of amino acids on one of Jupiter’s moons, or perhaps (if we’re really lucky) we’ll find fossils buried in the strata of Mars.
As a space enthusiast, I’m eager for the discovery of alien life; but as a Sci-Fi writer, I’m dreading the day a discovery like that is announced. Why? Because I’ve done a lot of world building for my Sci-Fi universe. I’ve invented multiple alien species. I’ve put a lot of thought into where all these different species come from, how they evolved, what sort of technology they each use. So if the day comes when we do discovery alien life, in real life, I’m dreading all the rewriting and retconning I’ll probably have to do.
Anyone relate?
Planet Pailly 
>chuckle< Worry not. No matter what we find in the real-world, there will be room for your creations. BTW, in my youth, I was a Big Foot fan. Expected to see a Big Foot in a zoo any day. Each year, more and more reports from more and more places… but never a critter. If these things are in everyone's backyard, why no specimen captured? I gradually lost my belief, though I still have my very first, mass-market paperback "Sasquatch."
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I used to believe in Big Foot, too. And the chupacabra. You know, I think it’s good to have an open mind about these things when you first hear about them. But when the evidence starts to not add up, or when the stories come into conflict with more well established facts about the world, some people will start imagining up excuses so they can keep their beliefs alive. That’s the point where open mindedness switches to conspiracy theorizing.
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This is one reason I’m reluctant to write near future fiction, or fiction that’s too specific with interstellar locations or specific future dates.
But if it happens, at least you’ll be in fine company. After all, we didn’t discover a monolith on the moon in 2001 and send a crewed mission to Jupiter, or have renegade replicants running around under flying cars by 2019. Star Trek has had to repeatedly retconn their stuff since we didn’t have eugenics wars in the 1990s. And let’s not even start with the pre-space-age view of the solar system, which some writers even brought back in “Old Mars” and “Old Venus” anthologies.
Worse case scenario: you have to declare the whole thing an alternate reality. If it’s a good story, I think most people will go with it.
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I kind of loved how Star Trek recently hand-waved the eugenics war issue away with “a time traveler did it.” There’s enough time travel shenanigans in my writing that I can probably do the same. But the U.F.O. hearings made me nervous, for a moment, that I’d have to change something in my current WIP. That would have been a little annoying.
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Speaking as a writer who, in 2018, started publishing a six-book series about a strange virus spreading exponentially through the world’s population… I’d say get over it. If UFOs land on the White House lawn, you’ll have bigger problems to worry about.
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Heh… fair enough!
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Yeah, it’s more about the spy balloons.
That’s why I write about a galaxy far, far away. Who knows what is happening there?
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Smart. I thought about doing something similar: either writing in a distant galaxy or going so far into the future that Earth has faded into myth and legend. But then this one idea bit me, and it won’t let go. If any real discoveries get in the way, I’ll just have to write around them.
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I think we have too tight of a definition on what we think life is. Who knows, maybe, there are aliens like in Farscape that are plant based or liquid like in Next Generation. Fiction gives us things to think about. Want a documentary that is kinda fascinating in its own right, watch “One Strange Rock” and be amazed that life happened at all. 😉
Anna from elements of emaginette
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It is pretty incredible that life happened at all, and intelligent life is even more incredible still. Which is one of the reasons the U.F.O. stuff lost its appeal to me. I’m sure there are other intelligent species out there, somewhere, but are any of them near enough to come pay us a visit? That seems improbable. Not impossible, but definitely improbable.
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Technically there has got to be numerous types of alien life and so if we discover only one type, your writing won’t be inaccurate and need rewriting, it still could be close to something we just haven’t discovered yet!
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True. And barring a U.F.O. on the White House lawn situation, even when we do detect life on another world, it’ll still take us decades to learn anything specific about that life. That’ll give me plenty of time to figure something out. 🙂
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I’m that way with my science fiction stories when it comes to ongoing advancements in computer technology, so yeah, in that way I can relate. One of my stories for my upcoming book of short fiction, “Bad Apps”, doesn’t seem much more than a step away from today’s AI search engines and chat boxes.
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A.I. is another topic that makes me nervous. Right now, I feel like anything I try to write about A.I. in the future could be laughably out of date next week.
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Wow, I never thought of that before. You’ve got me thinking now!
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Nice!
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I never thought I’d see the day when aliens were no longer science fiction! I think it’s always a little unsettling as a writer when you see things that previously only existed in your head end up being true, or at least partially. I remember I few years ago, I wrote a story on my blog about a suitcase murder. At the time, I hadn’t heard about the more famous one, but there was another one that happened years later that I saw on this true crime show “Fatal Attraction” that totally freaked me out because it sounded so much like my story!
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Finding out your crime fiction is eerily similar to a true crime? Yeah, I can see how that might be uncomfortable. Some ideas are only fun as fiction, and it would be nice if they could stay fictional.
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