What's The Frequency, Kenneth? [Podcast Review: The Message]

In this sci-fi podcast, linguist and podcaster Nicki Tomalin blags her way into joining a team of cryptographers as working on a recording that just might be the first ever received communication from an extraterrestrial source.

The Message is short and action-packed, with just eight episodes all under 15 minutes. The plot goes nuclear fast, with new developments, twists and levels of threat in each episode. I initially thought too much was given away in the second episode but I was wrong - there was plenty more material to come.

There's never a point where The Message could be confused with reality - it's too intense and melodramatic, but as a radio play it works well, with some decent writing - the cryptographers on the team have well thought out characters and backstories, the team dynamics are also interesting including the odd relationship between the two team leaders, and the voice acting is consistently good. The Macguffin at the heart of this story is only partly believable but if you can't suspend your disbelief a little then you have no business listening to a sci-fi podcast.

The story will appeal to fans of books or films about first contact and alien messages, whether optimistic as in Arrival or Contact, or horror-tinged - Fluency, Alien etc. The Serial-style podcast format works well with the story, and also paves the way for several of the twists, often playing tricks with the format.

You can listen to The Message here.

Ringworld Engineers At Work [KIC8462852]

Star KIC8462852 is currently in the spotlight due to unexplained observations from the Kepler spaceprobe: one possible explanation for the pattern is an alien megastructure around the star. Here's that serious article by Phil Plait on why this is unlikely but not ridiculous.

Freeman Dyson and other astronomers suggested that alien civilizations might build giant structures around stars to make better use of space or materials, or to capture more of the star's energy using solar panels. This is a good scientific idea as it's testable - these structures should be detectable, as they would give themselves away through their interference with the light from their parent star. Science fiction writers have come up with many variations on the theme of alien megastructures, including Larry Niven's Ringworld.

SETI astronomers are planning to analyze KIC8462852 using a range of telescopes, looking for signals that might suggest the presence of technology. It's likely that over the next few months - perhaps by January - they will have a better answer as to whether this anomaly is artificial. In all honesty, the most likely outcome is that they find nothing of the sort - so let's enjoy the next few months while it's still possible to imagine that we're not alone in the universe. 

[illustrations by Sci-Fi Gene, created in Blender 2.7]

Just how alien are the constructors at KIC8462852, and what's the easiest way to communicate with them? Well, it turns out they do have a Twitter feed...

Tweets by @KIC8462852

Unearthly Children [My Favourite Martian bloghop]

Our galaxy is now known to be full of planets of all sizes, including small rocky worlds a little like our own. It’s no longer unreasonable to say that the chance of life emerging elsewhere in the galaxy is pretty good.

However there’s no reason for that alien life to resemble our own human civilization. Our own intelligence is just a good survival trick that helped us to colonize a particular niche. Most of the Earth’s other inhabitants manage just fine without smarts, or, in a few cases (dolphins, octopi, social insects and certain plants) they seem to use them in a different way.

In my opinion many aliens in science fiction appear too human, in both appearance and motivation. Sometimes this is to the good – after all, a lot of sci-fi is metaphor or allegory, but sometimes, frankly, it’s just lazy. Cat-like aliens are another issue – I’ve blogged about them in the past and will do so again. However it’s always good to see, or read about the exceptions: this post is dedicated to my favourite aliens who are truly alien.

[Tripod: Jeff Wayne's The War Of The Worlds stage show. Photo: Sci-Fi Gene]

H.G. Wells’ Martians: the blog hoppers amongst you will be pleased to discover that my favourite aliens are indeed Martian. In his classic novel of alien invasion, Wells imagined an ancient species shaped by the environment of Mars and by their own evolutionary history: mentally supercharged but physically frail after tens of thousands of years of dependence on their machines.

Runners up:

Alastair Reynolds’ Shrouders and Pattern Jugglers, the aliens of Revelation Space. Shrouders are inscrutable hermits, hidden behind deadly shields, while the Jugglers hide in plain sight: an intelligent sea capable of communication, exchange and barter but still unpredictable and equally mysterious.

The Borg: most of Star Trek’s aliens are just people with prosthetic skin features or pointy ears and mullets. When the Borg first appeared, for a while they were something genuinely different – even though Borg units still have a humanoid shape (fair enough, they are the absorbed bodies of other Star Trek species) the Borg collective intelligence was an unstoppable force unlike anything on Earth. Sadly later episodes featuring the Borg Queen or liberated units such as Seven of Nine gave the species back too much humanity.

The Xeelee: Stephen Baxter’s aliens are master engineers, working on galaxy-wide projects with purposes utterly beyond human imagination – so our predictable response, since we can’t understand them, is to throw stuff at them.

Finally the Alien itself, the xenomorph which has no humanity, just a hunger to seek out prey and complete its lifecycle. Its appearance, while designed to play on basic human fears, is perfectly unearthly.

I concede that it’s hard to write or portray something truly alien, just as it’s hard for a writer to come up with any character that is not, somehow, a facet of their own personality. But it’s not impossible – and it’s worth going that extra light-year to make your alien species a little more credible.

We are not alone! This post is part of the My Favourite Martian bloghop, hosted by http://www.thegeektwins.com, http://justadashofgeek.com, http://lkhill.blogspot.com and www.comicbookandmoviereviews.com. You can find out about the bloghop and other participants here.