Those mosquito coils worked a treat! Thank heavens (and the above mentioned gods if you're so inclined) I don't know how many more nights I could have taken being dive bombed in the ears. Why do they always seem to target the ears (and occasionally the nostrils) anyway? Is there significant heat lost from the body through those various orifi that they're attracted to them as a heat source?
Having just been through my emails for the day, I noticed a new scam now doing the rounds. This one aimed at Bigpond (a large ISP in Australia) users, along the same lines as the standard bank phishing scams. Just as well I sent out that warning about email scams to my newsletter subscribers yesterday.
Jeff Carver's course has set me a tough one today. Aliens. One I've neatly avoided till now by basing my worlds early in the space opera developmental stages, pre-FTL, so confined to within our own somewhat limited solar system. I have thought about aliens before, I mean, what kind of sci fi writer with any self respect wouldn't? The thing that's always had me stop short with them before, is the same question that's been plaguing the worlds of biology, philosophy even theology for as long as these various forms of study have existed. What, when it comes down it, is life? Would we even recognise an alien life form if it popped up in our porridge. (To quote the late great Douglas Adams.) I'm going to have to have a long hard think about this one. Just how alien do I want my aliens? I certainly don't want to create yea olde man in a rubber suit type of alien, what's the point, it's been done to death. I'm thinking with my aliens, there will be two very interesting points of view to explore. Differences (obviously) and how those differences affect interactions with humans (who, for now at least will most likely be my main characters... for now... Hmmm) but of course the other potentially very interesting thing to explore may well be similarities, without which they never would have been encountered of course.
While thinking about all this, Paula and I popped out to pick up the mail. We took Basil with us and walked around the, for want of a better word, town. Today I suggested a quick stop off at the odd 'n sods shop up the road. It's called Billy Bags and, despite the tiny size of the town, is quite well known, even back in Kiama before we came here, our next door neighbour told us about the place. Paula had a ball in there while I was minding the dog outside, sniffing the life sized plastic cows (the dog, not me) and exploring the road side around the shop. Then Paula came out and said the shop keeper wanted a word with me. She'd signed up to the Dr Daves newsletter and had been meaning to get in touch about the several computers in her life, all running a whole lot slower than she'd like them to. Needless to say, I'll be back at some as yet unspecified date to rectify the situation for her.
So, Aliens. Note the capitol A. I've decided that my aliens will be very, very different. At least my first ones will be. So different in fact that they're not recognised as a life form at all for some time. I'm still mulling over exactly what form they'll take and how they'll be discovered, but I do have some vague ideas slowly starting to coalesce in my head.
What if the Tectonic plates that our continents rest on are actually alive? What if the Himalayas for example are a form a writing? How does a life-form with such a short life span as us communicate with such a long lived, slow thinking, slow moving, vast thing? It would be like expecting a microbe to communicate with us. No, even that's out of scale, a sub atomic virus, if such a thing could exist. Interesting... what about sub atomic life? I think that may have been done already, but in tandem with the outrageously huge other forms it could make an interesting dynamic. What if the Tectonic life forms are just the larval stage of planet sized life forms, and we're just parasites, or maybe some form of symbiote. Is tearing apart the world actually our function in assisting the gestation of these beings? Is that why wars always seem to be boiling away, ready to spill into ever bigger more dangerous conflagrations. I may just have my next short story idea here...
Pizza is a rare and precious thing, or so it seems in the midlands of Tasmania. Paula and I had decided to go to the pub for dinner last night, only to discover that they don't do counter meals on Fridays anymore, only Saturdays. So, we set out in search for somewhere else to eat. Twenty odd kilometers up the road, we hit the midland highway that runs between Launceston and Hobart and turned right, toward Lonny as the locals call it. We'd programmed our GPS to find us the nearest place to eat and it guided us to a gorgeous town called Evandale. We'll have to go back there some day soon. Not much point this night, as every food place in town shut at or before 8:00PM and it was 8:15 by the time we got there. We'd traveled over fifty kilometers by this time and where only twenty odd from Lonny so we decided to keep going. Luckily, we found a pizza take away joint in Perth. Excellent pizza, just an awful long way to go get it. Odd thing was, they heard my wife's American accent and assumed we must be from Hobart because it sounded different from what they usually got. Must not get too many tourists through there of a night.
No comments:
Post a Comment