Insidious Parasites in Sci Fi can be repulsive or beautiful

Photo by Nick Fewings (unsplash.com/@jannerboy62)

N.K. Jemisin designs a horrific parasitic overlord

N.K. Jemisin, a winner of both Hugo and Locus awards, writes about human-designed parasites that took over the world in her short story, “Walking Awake” in the 2019 short story collection Sunspot Jungle: The Ever Expanding Universe of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Vol. 1.

Alien woman's face

“They were created from other things. Parasites–bugs and fungi and microbes and more–that force other creatures to do what they want.” Most human bodies on Earth are controlled by the parasites, called the Masters, and the remaining humans serve them. The parasite itself has waving head-tendrils and a stinger.

When a Master needs a new human host, it visits a transfer center, where human hosts are raised. The transfer is gruesome and painful for the old host and the new one.

“When the Master came in and lay down on the right-hand table, [the girl] Ten-36 fell silent in awe. She remained silent, though Sadie suspected this was no longer due to awe, when the Master tore its way out of the old body’s neck and stood atop the twitching flesh, head-tendrils and proboscides and spinal stinger steaming faintly in the cool air of the chamber. Then it crossed from one outstretched arm to the other and began inserting itself into Ten-36. It had spoken the truth about its skill. Ten-36 convulsed twice and threw up; but her heart never stopped, and the bleeding was no worse than normal.”

Stephenie Meyer imagines beautiful, peaceful parasitic creatures

Stephenie Meyer, who wrote the paranormal Twilight Saga, also wrote a beautiful Sci Fi novel, The Host. The parasites have taken over the dominant species on at least seven worlds. Earth was one of their most recent conquests, but only a few human rebels remain.

The parasites, which call themselves “souls,” also have a procedure in a lab-like setting where they insert a parasite into a human body, but the human body is unconscious and the procedure seems much more peaceful.

Up-close image of a blue eye with a ring of pale blue on the inside of the iris

“[The Healer] Fords concentrated on the unconscious body; he edged the scalpel through the skin at the base of the subject’s skull and with small, precise movements, and then he sprayed on the medication that stilled the excess flow of blood before he widened the fissure. Fords delved delicately beneath the neck muscles, careful not to injure them, exposing the pale bones at the top of the spinal column.”

. . . .

“[The assistant] Darren’s hand moved into view, the silver gleam of an awaking soul in his cupped palm.”

“Fords never saw an exposed soul without being struck by the beauty of it.”

“The soul shone in the brilliant lights of the operating room, brighter than the reflective silver instrument in his hand. Like a living ribbon, she twisted and rippled, stretching, happy to be free of the cryotank. Her thin, feathery attachments, nearly a thousand of them, billowed softly like pale silver hair. Though they were all lovely, this one seemed particularly graceful to Fords Deep Waters.”

. . . .

“Gently, Darren placed the small glistening creature inside the opening Fords had made in the human’s neck. The soul slid smoothly into the offered space, weaving herself into the alien anatomy. Fords admired the skill with which she possessed her new home. Her attachments wound tightly into place around the nerve centers, some elongating and reaching deeper to where he couldn’t see, under and up into the brain, the optic nerves, the ear canals. She was very quick, very firm in her movements. Soon, only one small segment of her glistening body was visible.”

Design your own parasite

Caterpillar with black head and back and translucent underbelly
Photo by Holger Link (unsplash.com/@photoholgic)
  • Will it possess humans, cats, elephants?
  • Will it look horrific or strangely beautiful?
  • Will the host remain conscious? What will it think?

Please post your comments below.

Be stellar!

Matthew Cross

This is how the world ended…

Photo by Collin Armstrong (unsplash/@brazofuerte).

How did the world end?

When a book is set in a dystopian future on Earth, you know something terrible happened. But what happened? Some Sci Fi writers draw it out, feeding you the sad tale slowly piece by piece. Nora Roberts gives it to you straight from the get go.

The Prologue of Of Blood and Bone begins:


They said a virus ended the world.

And then it gets worse . . .

“And yet the innocent–the touch of a hand, a mother’s goodnight kiss–spread the Doom, bringing sudden, painful, ugly death to billions.

“Many who survived that first shocking strike died by their own hand or by another’s as the thorny vines of madness, grief, and fear strangled the world. Still others, unable to find shelter, food, clean water, medications, simply withered and died waiting for help and hope that never came.

“The spine of technology cracked, bringing the dark, the silence. Governments toppled from their perches of power.

“The Doom gave no quarter to democracy, to dictators, to parliaments or kingdoms. It fed on presidents and peasants with equal greed.”

And then Nora Roberts reveals that the world of her novel, which begins in Year Twelve after the Doom, contains both modern technology and “magicks.”

How does the new world work?

Once the world “ends” and a new world begins to rise, it can have elements of science fiction, fantasy or the paranormal. Or a combination.

In pure Sci Fi, the new world can contain technology that is futuristic to us but that existed before the downfall, new technology created after, or a mix of both. In the Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, the leaders in the Capital have flying cars, but they’ve forgotten how to build airplanes. In Ready Player One by Ernest Cline, the world is in bad shape but the technology continues to advance with ever improving virtual reality technology.

[Read my review of Ready Player One.]

Some authors use the apocalypse to clear the world of technology. In Ariel by Steven R. Boyett, one of my favorite novels, all technology just stops working and magic takes its place. After the Change, even something as simple as a bicycle just doesn’t work anymore.

Other authors mix technology and magic. Piers Anthony does this with alternate universes–one magical and one technological–in his Apprentice Adept series. Can you think of something more recent?

Plan your new world!

Imagine your own dystopian future for Earth. What will you include?

  • Science and technology that does not yet exist?
  • Magic, mystical powers, or strange abilities of the mind?
  • Creatures only found in dreams or nightmares?

Please post your comments below.

Be stellar!

Matthew Cross

Win a cash prize if you write the best finish to my story!

Image: Person pointing flashlight into the night sky. Text: Hello, Universe!--Win a cash prize if you write the best finish to my story!
Photo by Andreas Dress (unsplash.com/@andreasdress)
Photo of crocheted narwhal amigurumi, which is a prize for the contest, along with $25

This is my very first Finish-My-Story Contest. So I’m offering a cash prize of $25 plus this amigarumi collectible that I crocheted myself. (It’s a narwhal.)

September Contest: All submissions are due by midnight September 15, 2020. 

Look here for contest rules.

Hello, Universe!

Jess leaned back in the blue, plastic Adirondack chair on the back deck.  It was a kids chair and he had almost outgrown it.  But it was the only chair that allowed him to tilt his head back to look at the stars.

Tunes from the 1960s purred from the outdoor speaker.  His Mom kept the family speakers on a steady rotation of “decades” music going back seventy years.

They lived in the suburbs.  With light pollution, Jess knew he wasn’t even seeing half the stars up there.  But this summer, with all the bad news online, he found himself escaping to the quiet of the back deck and looking at the starry sky.

In school, he had read about the Civil War and the Holocaust and the Civil Rights Movement and a bunch of other depressing stuff.  And then his grandfather had died.  Jess and his grandfather were not close, but everyone went to the funeral and everyone cried.  Even Jess cried.

Sometime that summer, Jess realized everyone else in his family would die.  Not anytime soon.  Probably not, anyway.  But, eventually, his parents would grow old and die.  And, eventually, Jess would also grow old and die.  And if he ever had kids, they would grow old and die.  Someday, everyone Jess knew would be dead.

It sucked.

Staring up at the night sky made him feel small and a little scared.  It never used to before.  But when he was little, he didn’t know how much empty space was really up there.  And how tiny the Earth really was.

Last week and the week before he had stared up at the stars.

Maybe, he had thought, it would be OK to die as long as I’m remembered.  Maybe I could get famous like Elvis or Beyonce.  So famous that no one would ever forget me.

Jess had thought about that for a couple of weeks.  He would have to be really famous to be remembered in two million years.  Like Hitler famous.  And he didn’t want to be evil.  He remembered seeing photos of the gas chambers and shuddered.

In two million years, the wind might even wear down the Great Pyramids and the even the pharaohs of Egypt would be forgotten.

Words floated from the speaker on the dark, night air.

Words are flowing out like

Endless rain into a paper cup

They slither wildly as they slip away across the universe

It was “Across the Universe” by the Beatles.  His Dad loved the Beatles.  All of the Beatles were dead.

Pools of sorrow, waves of joy

Are drifting through my opened mind

And that’s when the idea struck Jess.  He rummaged through the junk drawer and found a penlight.  He sat back in the kid-size Adirondack and shone the light into the sky.

Dad was an engineer and he knew lots of science.  He said light beams were made of photons.  In space, photons just keep traveling forever–travel at the speed of light, Dad said–unless they hit something. Like a planet or a star.

Jess sent the weak beam of light into space.  He clicked the light on and off.  If he knew Morse Code, he could send a message on a stream of photons into space.  And if that beam never ran into a star or a planet, it would travel forever.  Unlike the pyramids, it would never be worn down by wind or time.

The next day Jess bought a brand new flashlight–the most powerful one he could afford at the big box hardware store.  That night on the deck, he sent coded messages into space.  He looked up Morse code on his phone and shot off the messages in different directions into the sky.

Hi

I am here

My name is Jess

Im alive

I dont want to die

Never forget me

 . . .

Halfway through high school, Jess had learned enough about lasers to build his own high-powered laser from a kit.  He even got his Dad to help mount it on the roof.  Mom thought he was crazy, but Dad was into science stuff and thought it was a cool project.

Jess studied star charts and learned how to aim his laser using the computer in his room.  He sent coded messages into the night sky almost every night.  He aimed the laser into the empty stretches between stars, nebulae, and galaxies to give his messages the best chance of flying forever through space.

No human would ever see them.  Racing at the speed of light away from the Earth, no human could ever catch up with them to capture the light and decode it.

And what alien would ever know how to decode Morse code?  Or care to try?

But Jess knew that his coded messages racing through space would last longer than even the Earth itself.  Eventually, the sun would supernova and the Earth and the Moon and every human landmark in the Solar System would be absorbed, melted, obliterated.  But Jess’s small, silent, staggered rays of light would live on.

Forever.

. . .

In college, he studied engineering and physics, trying to decide which way to go.  Both were incredibly tough.  Jess had programmed the computer in his bedroom at home to aim the roof-mounted laser at the emptiest reaches of space.  He had saved hundreds of different coded messages and each night, his computer sent the messages into space.

He was so busy at school, he forgot about the laser most of the time.  And, miracle of miracles, he finally had a girlfriend!

But when he came home on breaks, he checked the laser on the roof.  He cleared the dead leaves away, wiped the lens, applied another coat of water proofing.  He checked his sky maps and scheduled some new programs to run when he was away.  At night, sitting on the deck, he thought up new messages to send.

Hi

I am Jess

This message will outlast everyone

The pharaohs

The presidents

Taylor Swift

BTS

Remember me

Jess was not trying to reach anyone out there.  He never thought to try to look for replies to his messages.  Besides, detecting a laser reply from space would be quite a trick.  That would take more physics, engineering and money than he had.

So it was merely by luck that he was sitting on the back deck after graduation, drinking a beer and peering up into the sky, that he saw it. (This final paragraph is optional for your story ending.)

 . . . .

Submit your story ending

I can’t wait to see your story endings! Don’t forget to read the contest rules.

Please post your story endings below.

Be stellar!

Matthew Cross

Quick and Easy Explanation of the Kuiper Belt

An artist’s impression of a Kuiper Belt object (KBO), located on the outer rim of our solar system at a staggering distance of 4 billion miles from the sun. Image Credit: NASA, ESA, and G. Bacon (STScI).

Kuiper Belt–a donut-shaped collection of asteroids beyond the orbit of Neptune

Where is the Kuiper Belt located?

The Kuiper Belt orbits around the sun just beyond the orbit of Neptune. It covers a vast region of space starting about 2.7 billion miles (4.4 billion kilometers) from the sun. It stretches to about 9.3 billion miles (14.9 billion kilometers) away from the sun.

Here’s another way of thinking about it. The distance from the sun to the Earth is described as 1 atomic unit (AU). The Kuiper Belt stretches from 30 AU to 100 AU from the sun. That means the distance from the inside edge of the Kuiper Belt to its outside edge is much wider than the region inside the Kuiper Belt, the region from the sun to Neptune! (Compare that to the Asteroid Belt, which is only 140 million miles wide.)

If you have ever seen a model of the solar system, you know the eight planets all travel in the same plane around the sun. Their orbits–the paths they take–look like a disc (or flat plate) of rings around the sun. The Main Asteroid Belt also orbits around the sun, between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, along this same plane. The Main Asteroid Belt is flat.

Artist’s concept showing the exploration of the Kuiper Belt so far. New Horizons became the first spacecraft to explore a Kuiper Belt Object—dwarf planet Pluto—up close in 2015. Image grab from Solarsystem.nasa.gov.

Unlike the Main Asteroid Belt, the Kuiper Belt is not flat. It is donut-shaped with icy bodies orbiting the sun above and below the plane or disc formed by the orbits of the planets.

[Compare the orbits of planets and the orbits of electrons in atoms!]

What can be found in the Kuiper Belt?

The largest object in the Kuiper Belt is the dwarf planet Pluto. Astronomers once called Pluto a planet, but in 2006 it was reclassified as a dwarf planet. Like other planets, it orbits the sun and it has enough mass to have formed a round shape, instead of the bumpy, irregular shape of an asteroid. But Pluto’s gravity has not cleared a path through Pluto’s orbit of asteroids and other bodies.

Most of the objects floating in the Kuiper Belt are small clumps of rock and ice. These are ancient remnants left over from the formation of our Solar System.

Asteroids in the Kuiper Belt and the Main Asteroid Belt come in many shapes and sizes. There is even a snowman-shaped asteroid in the Kuiper Belt named Arrokoth.

Image of the asteroid Arrokoth, which appears as two round lumps joined together, one lump slightly larger than the other.
Here is a photo of Arrokoth taken by the New Horizons spacecraft. Image grabbed from NASA’s website.

NASA has a great interactive web page dedicated to the Kuiper Belt.

Colonize the Kuiper Belt!

You finally have the ships, the fuel and your team in place to colonize this cold, distant part of the Solar System. What will you do there? How will you make a living?

  • Mine for metals?
  • Collect ice water for other space colonies?
  • Act as a guide for adventurous vacationers?

Please post your comments below.

Be stellar!

Matthew Cross

Factions–In Divergent, you choose a faction to become your tribe. Who do you choose?

Image: Flame in octagonal bowl. Text: Choose your FACTION! -- In Divergent, you choose a faction to become your tribe. Who do you choose!
Photo by KS Kyung (unsplash.com/@mygallery)

Choose your destiny! Choose your tribe!

In the wizarding world of Harry Potter, the students of Hogwarts are sorted into four houses. And, of course, the famous Sorting Hat chooses your house for you.

Young Adult books are about finding yourself. (And Middle Grade books, too!) And part of finding yourself is finding your “tribe,” the type of people you want to hang out with. The kind of people you want to become.

Let’s explore the tribes in a Sci Fi standout: Divergent.

In Divergent, by Veronica Roth, at age sixteen you must choose from one of five factions. You can choose to remain in the faction that raised you. Or you can risk joining another faction. If you fail the tests, you become one of the homeless outcasts, the factionless, a fate worse than death!

Cover of Divergent by Veronica Roth. Image: Flaming bowl of fire imposed over Chicago's skyline

Welcome to the Choosing Ceremony

“Welcome to the Choosing Ceremony. Welcome to the day we honor the democratic philosophy of our ancestors, which tells us that every man has the right to choose his own way in this world.

. . . .

“Our dependents are now sixteen. They stand on the precipice of adulthood, and it is now up to them to decide what kind of people they will be . . . . Decades ago our ancestors realized that it was not political ideology, religious belief, race, or nationalism that is to blame for a warring world. Rather, they determined that it was the fault of human personality–of humankind’s inclination toward evil, in whatever form that is. They divided into factions that sought to eradicate those qualities they believed responsible for the world’s disarray.”

[I]t is now up to them to decide what kind of people they will be.

“Those who blamed aggression formed Amity.”

Amity

“The Amity exchange smiles. They are dressed comfortably, in red or yellow. Every time I see them, they seem kind, loving, free. But joining them has never been an option for me.”

“Those who blamed ignorance became the Erudite.”

Erudite

“And when they clear out [my brother Caleb’s] room, what will they discover? I imagine books jammed between the dresser and the wall, books under his mattress. The Erudite thirst for knowledge filling all the hidden places in his room.”

. . . .

“A long time ago, Erudite pursued knowledge and ingenuity for the sake of doing good. Now they pursue knowledge and ingenuity with greed in their hearts.”

“Those who blamed duplicity created Candor.”

Candor

“The Candor man wears a black suit with a white tie–Candor standard uniform. Their faction values honesty and sees the truth as black and white, so that is what they wear.”

“Those who blamed selfishness made Abnegation.”

Abnegation

Gray hoodie worn by someone waiting for a train

“The houses on my street are all the same size and shape. They are made of gray cement, with few windows, in economical, no-nonsense rectangles. Their lawns are crabgrass and their mailboxes are dull metal. To some the sight might be gloomy, but to me their simplicity is comforting.

If we have little, and want for little, and we are all equal, we envy no one.

“The reason for the simplicity isn’t disdain for uniqueness, as the other factions have sometimes interpreted it. Everything–our houses, our clothes, our hairstyles–is meant to help us forget ourselves and to protect us from vanity, greed, and envy, which are just forms of selfishness. If we have little, and want for little, and we are all equal, we envy no one.

“I try to love it.”

. . . .

“I blame selfishness; I do.”

. . . .

“But I am not selfless enough. Sixteen years of trying and I am not enough.”

“And those who blamed cowardice were the Dauntless.”

Dauntless

Back of shaved head; white gauge in ear; dagger tattoo behind ear
Photo by Panos Sakalakis (unsplash.com/@meymigrou)

“In front of [the school] is a large metal sculpture that the Dauntless climb after school, daring each other to go higher and higher. Last year I watched one of them fall and break her leg.”

. . . .

“At exactly 7:25, the Dauntless prove their bravery by jumping from a moving train.

“My father calls the Dauntless ‘hellions.’ They are pierced, tattooed, and black clothed. Their primary purpose is to guard the fence that surrounds our city. From what, I don’t know.”

Choose your faction!

“In the last circle are five metal bowls so large they could hold my entire body, if I curled up. Each one contains a substance that represents each faction: gray stones for Abnegation, water for Erudite, earth for Amity, lit coals for Dauntless, and glass for Candor.

I will cut into my hand and sprinkle my blood into the bowl of the faction I choose.

“When Marcus calls my name, I will walk to the center of the three circles. I will not speak. He will offer me a knife. I will cut into my hand and sprinkle my blood into the bowl of the faction I choose.”

Which faction will you choose?

Choose one of the five factions. Choose your tribe. How will you decide?

Please post your comments below.

Be stellar!

Matthew Cross