Alien Lessons by @LibbyDoyle9

By Libby Doyle 

Imagine you’re a miner in space, digging ore from the bowels of an inhospitable planet. An alien creature is stalking your fellow miners, burning them to a crisp. You’d want to kill it wouldn’t you? Of course, you would. But suppose it turns out you’re the invader?

All you Trekkies out there may recognize this as the plot of the classic Star Trek episode “The Devil in the Dark.”

The alien creature turns out to be a horta, a silicon-based life form. The miners had tunneled into the horta’s egg chamber and were callously destroying her progeny. They didn’t know the nodules they’d found were eggs. To make matters worse, the horta was the last of her kind, charged with tending the eggs until a new generation was born. Thanks to Captain Kirk and Spock, who mind-melded with the creature, the humans were able to learn all this before it was too late for the horta. The miners agreed to safeguard the eggs, and the horta agreed to stop incinerating the miners, even to help them.

“The Devil in the Dark,” is one of my favorite Star Trek episodes. I like its lesson – that our hatred of one another often stems from fear, ignorance, and miscommunication. In fact, one of the reasons I adore science fiction is what alien characters can teach us about ourselves.

Ursula K. LeGuin’s classic 1969 novel, The Left Hand of Darkness, used its alien characters to hold a mirror up to one of the most vexing (and wonderful) aspects of the human condition: gender.

Human male Genly Ai travels to the planet of Winter to entice its inhabitants—the Karhadians—to become part of the Ekumen, a confederation of planets. The Karhadians are a sexless race. To reproduce, they enter kemmer, which is like estrus in animals. At that time, they can turn either male or female depending on who catches their fancy. If they turn female, they can become a mother. If they turn male, they can father a child. After kemmer, they return to complete androgyny.

I love this bit, when Estraven, a Karhadian, asks Genly about women:

“Are they like a different species?”

“No. Yes. No, of course not, not really. But the difference is very important. I suppose the most important thing, the heaviest single factor in one’s life, is whether one’s born male or female. In most societies it determines one’s expectations, activities, outlook, ethics, manners—almost everything. . . . It’s extremely hard to separate the innate differences from the learned ones.”

And this passage isn’t the only one that makes you think. When Genly sends a report back to his superiors, he says: “The fact that everyone between seventeen and thirty-five or so is liable to be . . . ‘tied down to childbearing,’ implies that no one is quite so thoroughly ‘tied down’ here as women, elsewhere, are likely to be – psychologically or physically. Burden and privilege are shared out pretty equally[.]”

What a concept! The book is filled with these nuggets.

Now, you may say to me, Libby, this is the Science Fiction Romance Brigade blog, and you haven’t mentioned a romance yet! But I consider Left Hand to be a love story. Estraven and Genly face extreme hardship together, and love grows. When Estraven enters kemmer, there’s a spark of attraction, but their situation precludes romance. It doesn’t matter. This novel is one of the most profound depictions of love I’ve ever read, and Estraven is a total [expletive deleted] hero. Really, it’s beautiful.

The Left Hand of Darkness also touches on another theme near and dear to my heart, which happens to be where it gets its title. A religion described in the book believes in the unity of all living things, expressed in the precept: “Light is the left hand of darkness and darkness the right hand of light.”

I started writing my own books before I read Left Hand, and I was excited to discover this theme. My own Covalent Seriesfeatures the concept of Balance, the equilibrium of light and darkness, order and entropy, love and hate. I was inspired by yin and yang and covalent bonds, which are formed when two atoms share a pair of electrons to create a stable balance of attractive and repulsive forces. 

The hero of The Covalent Series, the alien warrior Barakiel, derives his power from Balance. His powerful enemies mean he needs his hatred. He needs that energy. Lucky for him, he meets the heroine, Zan O’Gara. She’s his left hand, the light that balances his darkness. He’s good for her, as well. His race, the Covalent, view sex as one of life’s great joys, casual or committed. For them, sex is never, ever a source of shame. Through her alien lover, the human Zan learns to throw off the shame of her past.

That’s why I love science fiction romance as a genre. All those opportunities for our cross-species lovers to learn from one another.

Libby Doyle is the author of The Covalent Series. To learn more, visit libbydoyle.com.

From @LibbyDoyle9: Want to get to know your favorite writer? You already do.

By Libby Doyle

In Stephen King’s great series The Dark Tower, he famously introduced himself into the story, showing up in book six as an author telling the Gunslinger’s story, whom the Crimson King had marked for death.

Most don’t go to that extreme, of course, but I’m guessing few readers would be surprised to learn that writers put a lot of themselves into their characters. This is often true even if the story is light years from autobiographical, as the story must be in science fiction romance. After all, we’re not cavorting with hot alien warriors, as much as we may wish we were.

Inserting oneself into a character may not be intentional. Good writing reaches deep into the imagination and pulls out things the writer didn’t know were there. If you asked your favorite authors, I bet many would describe flowing into a mental space while they’re writing in which they don’t make conscious choices. The words come unbidden, and when they’re finished they think, “Oh, that’s good. Did that come out of me?”

Maybe the subconscious takes over. If so, the characters have to be serving up the writer’s own psychology. Can it be any other way?

Right now I’m reading 1984 by George Orwell. Yes, believe it or not, I’ve never read it. Early in the book, the protagonist performs the subversive act of making his first entry in a diary. Were anyone to discover he was keeping a diary, he would be “vaporized,” because it’s a “thoughtcrime,” as the world of 1984 puts it. Who else but a writer would have the first bold move towards freedom be putting pen to paper? If a soldier or a law enforcement officer was asked to think up some small act of rebellion, it might involve protecting someone from the authorities. A nurse might help an injured person. A teacher might give a lecture on a forbidden subject. But when telling stories is what you do, you believe in the power of stories.

As we should! Stories can elevate us, heal us, and teach us. They entertain us. Entertainment is more important than I think a lot of people give it credit for. Life is hard, right? People need to reduce their stress. The thing is, I don’t think writers will entertain anyone unless they entertain themselves. Writers won’t affect anyone emotionally unless they affect themselves. That’s why they have to draw from their own experiences to give their characters an authentic voice, even if the stories are sheer fantasy.

The experiences might be sliced and diced through the creative process until they’re barely recognizable. For example, the female protagonist of the Covalent Series, my epic science fantasy, isn’t me. Zan O’Gara is more who I wish I was: a badass FBI agent, strong and beautiful, who can play the guitar, has a great sense of humor and a killer left jab. She’s my notion of the ideal woman. But she’s got a ton of flaws and insecurities, as well. I didn’t know what they were when I started. To discover them I wrote scenes in which she reacted to events. Lo and behold, she’s got a bad temper. She second guesses herself. She holds onto a grudge like a pit bull onto a rawhide toy. She’s my ideal, but when the story calls for her to react in difficult situations, she messes up like I would mess up. I draw on my own emotional memory.

Of course, when she’s heroic, that’s not me. I’m a privileged person who’s never been called on to be heroic in my comfy life. So where does that come from? I suppose I rely on stories others have told me with so much skill I felt the emotions of the characters as my own. And it comes from real life in the larger sense, of course. On any given day the news is filled with enough drama to power a thousand stories.

All these tales, facts, emotions and eventualities go into my brain blender and out pours a story. Writers I know have described similar processes. We’re an odd bunch, but we sure do like to entertain.

Libby Doyle is the author of The Covalent Series, a sexy science fantasy in five parts. To learn more, visit libbydoyle.com. Be sure to check out her free short fiction.