Smile! You Cannot Move Your Limbs and They Are Coming for You

In addition to the aforementioned International Happiness Day, it is also Extraterrestrial Abduction Day, which makes for some great synergy, when you think about it.

Do you think about aliens a lot? I do. When I was little, I worried that thinking about aliens too much would single me out for abduction. Largely because that seems to be how it worked out for Whitley Strieber, but he no longer believes his experiences were extraterrestrial in nature, he thinks his visits may have been, in a metaphysical sense, from the dead. The dead, talking to the living. But he’s not sure.

Is that better, or worse? Would you rather be visited by the dead, or by aliens? It seems to me that the dead would be scarier, based on motion pictures and the episode of Torchwood where they reanimate the unpleasant woman, but that aliens would be more likely to actually manipulate your body in painful ways. Do you remember the Kids in the Hall sketch about alien probes?

But, again, aliens. There must be some aliens, somewhere, because the universe is so very large. I do not know if they have visited us, though. Or what they would want. I would dearly like us to make contact with aliens. I think that, sometimes, if you are not religious, it seems as though we would be very existentially lonely if there were really no aliens.

Here are some stories about alien abductions. You’ll notice a link to the Wikipedia entry for sleep paralysis, which happened to me once on a plane, when I nodded off while reading a book about Whitey Bulger (here is a fine new article of note about Whitey and his moll on the lam). And my brain woke up, but my body didn’t, and I thought I was having a stroke, and I could hear the pilot talking, but it sounded like the grownups in Charlie Brown, and I tried to get the attention of my seatmate, but could not move, and it lasted for about thirty seconds, and now I feel really bad for people who have this happen to them with any regularity.

Perhaps it’s time for someone to write a really high-quality work of literary fiction about aliens. Maybe me. Maybe you.

The aliens have come, but it’s sort of elliptical, like how there are clones in Never Let Me Go. And our protagonist grows to love one of the aliens, and they’re overcoming the massive hurdle of one of them being aliens, obviously, but that’s not the crisis, the crisis is that the alien is still in love with his alien lover from before. And our protagonist has a depressed sister who stays in bed and listens to Emmylou all day. And then the ending is stolen directly from Robert Silverberg’s novella Born With the Dead in which they reunite years later to hunt reanimated dodos in the shade of Mount Kilimanjaro.

If you want just one, really fun book of non-literary fiction about aliens, I would recommend Robert J. Sawyer’s Starplex (Indiebound | Amazon), which has this one variety of aliens that look like watermelons sitting in wheelchairs, and they live for a really, really long time, but they all live the exact same amount of time, to the second, and, as a result, are obsessed with wasting time, which is the only real crime in their society. Because if we lived for 200 years, but had to sit in the doctor’s office for 45 minutes while waiting to be seen, you could figure out exactly what percentage of your life you had just spent waiting, and it would wear on you. And the other major kind of aliens in Starplex look like pigs.

Which is all the really good writing about aliens, I guess? The very minor ways in which they make us ponder the uniqueness of the human condition, or wasting time, or being alone. We talked about this a little when Ray Bradbury died. There’s a lot of good fiction about the dead, of course. Robert J. Sawyer has a different book, The Terminal Experiment (Indiebound | Amazon) in which a man creates three electronic versions of himself (an identical control, one who has no knowledge or concept of death, and one who has no conception of physically existing) and one of them decides to begin murdering people who have bothered him in his life, and which one is it? Makes you think.

So, I guess what’s happening here is that you should read more science fiction than you currently do, and if you have met aliens, tell us about it. Or the dead.