The Guardians--A Novel

Do alien races exist? Of course there is no scientific evidence (or for those who are conspiracy theory buffs—non that has been accepted at this point) that they do, but they are a normal prop in the writing of many science fiction stories. The Guardians handles the interactions between four species. One is human. The others are alien. All three of the alien species encountered in the first novel of the Guardians are based in some way upon a human culture. Why? I could write and create anything in this universe. So why base it on human cultures?

The answer is simple, but in two parts. The first part is something I have learned as a reader of science fiction and a writer over all these years. If you make the alien too alien, you lose the reader. Have you ever noticed how people prefer the familiar? We like to group ourselves and be surrounded by things we can identify and identify with. This concept also flows into writing. It does not mean that I cannot create some “off the wall” alien race and lose my reader. It means that if I want my reader to stay focused on the story and understand (if not like) my alien, it should be familiar. Since I am throwing 3 alien cultures into the mix, it would behoove me to keep it somewhat familiar so I don’t lose the reader either.

The second reason is not quite so simple. I truly believe that history repeats itself over and over and over again until we either learn from our mistakes correctly or we simply earn the “Darwin Award” and kill ourselves off for being too stupid to live. By basing the alien cultures on human cultures (past and present) I am able to have the reader explore a social or political issue through the eyes of that culture as well as their own. Allow me an example. Pretend for a moment that the question of Global Warming was faced in the ancient world. How would Rome, Greece, Egypt, Persia, India, the Han Dynasty of China faced the question? What of the other nations that existed (or were conquered)? Now, let’s change issues. Pretend again it was something that did exist during the time period: homosexual relations. Many of the ancient cultures addressed this and all differently. What about unemployment? Take the same questions and lets advance time: Victorian England, Napoleonic France, the Shogun periods in Japan. I think you understand where I am going with this. The cultures change and so does the approach to the political, social, and scientific responses—even if they never faced them (to our knowledge anyway.)

In the next four blogs I am going to address the cultures that will be in The Guardians. The future human culture will be last.

Thank you for reading and please visit www.davidalanlucas.com for information on blogs, stories , articles, and poems that I write.