"The Alien Abduction" is a pretty simple story: a group of animal-rights activists free an alien from a lab at Cornell University and flee with him to a house in the country. Then things start to go wrong. The narrator, Brian, is a local boy and chose the hideout, and his brother George turns up unexpectedly and has to be kept prisoner. The armless alien Siusheas reveals that the human researchers were experimenting with creating prosthetic hands for him, which makes the activists upset at the thought of another species following humanity's path to technological civilization. Finally the alien breaks loose and, being a large carnivore, annihilates most of the activists. Meanwhile Brian, at his brother's urging, contacts the authorities and lets them know where Siusheas is.
I distinctly remember the origin of this story. I was sitting in the Silverbird Coffeehouse in Ithaca, New York, working on a roleplaying game book (probably GURPS Planet of Adventure, but possibly GURPS Mars). At a table nearby one local activist (Ithaca has activists the way other cities have pigeons) was telling another about his experiences protesting at the WTO conference in Seattle. Apparently he had some misgivings about some of the slogans being put forth, but his companion was more sanguine.
"It doesn't matter if you were right," she told him. "You got your message out; that's what's important."
That's all I needed. Just put someone with that mindset in a crummy dark farmhouse with a carnivorous alien with no hands, and everything else follows like clockwork.
I designed the alien to be intelligent, yet absolutely unable to manipulate his environment. Siusheas ("Sushi" to Earth's media) is roughly the size and build of an ostrich, but his feet are more like hooves and he has no forelimbs. In place of a beak he has a jagged slashing blade, and he feeds like an insect, squirting enzymes on his prey and sucking up the resulting soup through a feeding tube. He can't even pick up a stick.
However, he and his people can communicate, and coordinate, and build societies. They can herd their prey, and fight over herds and grazing rights. I tried to make it clear that their non-technological lifestyle has created even more ecological devastation than anything humans have accomplished -- millions of years of overgrazing have turned their planet's grasslands into a vast Sahara. Their population is in decline.
I also made it clear they have plenty of conflicts among themselves. Siusheas's people start as female at puberty, then become male after they've had a few offspring and grown big and strong enough to kill their husband and take his place. It's like a buck and his harem of does, except that it's the does who challenge him instead of young males.
Consequently Siusheas views the activists as a group of young females trying to gain status by killing him. His response is perfectly logical -- he demonstates his power by fighting them, but they don't give up so he winds up killing them all. (Except for the narrator, who runs away and calls the cops -- obviously he's not a threat.)
Research was simple: I drove around the Cornell campus and rural Tompkins County, noting down locations for the "Carl Sagan Institute for Xenobiology" and the abandoned farmhouse, and I continued hanging around downtown listening to local crackpots. My part-time job at the Ithaca Times included scanning and proofreading letters to the editor, so I had plenty of crackpottery to work with.
The story appeared in the September 2000 issue of F&SF, with only a few minor changes. The biggest single edit was the name of the leader of the activist group. In my first draft he was Pete Cantor, as a nod to the real-world eco-activist Pete Singer. (Cantor = Singer, geddit?)
What I didn't know was that Peter Kanter was publisher of Dell Magazines at the time, and Gordon Van Gelder didn't want to have a villainous character named for a colleague. So Pete Cantor became Pete Sutherland. I think I picked the new name at random -- if I intended any hidden meaning for "Sutherland" I've long since forgotten it.
This story has attracted interest from a couple of people as a potential low-budget short film. Given that almost all of it takes place in a single house, it could also be done as a one-act play. Everything would depend on how convincing an alien the producers can afford. Fortunately nowadays cheap CGI means even a small indy film maker could do a decent job. A stage play would require a really excellent puppet.
One thing which can't be done easily off the printed page is any depiction of Siusheas's thoughts and memories of his homeworld. I suppose it wouldn't be hard to give him a soliloquy or a speech describing all that. It is important that he be something more than just a scary monster in the dark.
This story sums up a lot of what I think about various issues. I think technology is a tremendous force for good, I think activism for its own sake is the express lane to fanaticism, and I despise people who want to make other people's decisions for them. It has been my misfortune to spend much of my adult life in various college towns, where there is a tremendous oversupply of people who claim to dislike technology, admire activism, and love to tell other people what they should think. Ah, well.
"It doesn't matter if you were right," she told him. "You got your message out; that's what's important."
That's all I needed. Just put someone with that mindset in a crummy dark farmhouse with a carnivorous alien with no hands, and everything else follows like clockwork.
I designed the alien to be intelligent, yet absolutely unable to manipulate his environment. Siusheas ("Sushi" to Earth's media) is roughly the size and build of an ostrich, but his feet are more like hooves and he has no forelimbs. In place of a beak he has a jagged slashing blade, and he feeds like an insect, squirting enzymes on his prey and sucking up the resulting soup through a feeding tube. He can't even pick up a stick.
However, he and his people can communicate, and coordinate, and build societies. They can herd their prey, and fight over herds and grazing rights. I tried to make it clear that their non-technological lifestyle has created even more ecological devastation than anything humans have accomplished -- millions of years of overgrazing have turned their planet's grasslands into a vast Sahara. Their population is in decline.
I also made it clear they have plenty of conflicts among themselves. Siusheas's people start as female at puberty, then become male after they've had a few offspring and grown big and strong enough to kill their husband and take his place. It's like a buck and his harem of does, except that it's the does who challenge him instead of young males.
Consequently Siusheas views the activists as a group of young females trying to gain status by killing him. His response is perfectly logical -- he demonstates his power by fighting them, but they don't give up so he winds up killing them all. (Except for the narrator, who runs away and calls the cops -- obviously he's not a threat.)
Research was simple: I drove around the Cornell campus and rural Tompkins County, noting down locations for the "Carl Sagan Institute for Xenobiology" and the abandoned farmhouse, and I continued hanging around downtown listening to local crackpots. My part-time job at the Ithaca Times included scanning and proofreading letters to the editor, so I had plenty of crackpottery to work with.
The story appeared in the September 2000 issue of F&SF, with only a few minor changes. The biggest single edit was the name of the leader of the activist group. In my first draft he was Pete Cantor, as a nod to the real-world eco-activist Pete Singer. (Cantor = Singer, geddit?)
What I didn't know was that Peter Kanter was publisher of Dell Magazines at the time, and Gordon Van Gelder didn't want to have a villainous character named for a colleague. So Pete Cantor became Pete Sutherland. I think I picked the new name at random -- if I intended any hidden meaning for "Sutherland" I've long since forgotten it.
This story has attracted interest from a couple of people as a potential low-budget short film. Given that almost all of it takes place in a single house, it could also be done as a one-act play. Everything would depend on how convincing an alien the producers can afford. Fortunately nowadays cheap CGI means even a small indy film maker could do a decent job. A stage play would require a really excellent puppet.
One thing which can't be done easily off the printed page is any depiction of Siusheas's thoughts and memories of his homeworld. I suppose it wouldn't be hard to give him a soliloquy or a speech describing all that. It is important that he be something more than just a scary monster in the dark.
This story sums up a lot of what I think about various issues. I think technology is a tremendous force for good, I think activism for its own sake is the express lane to fanaticism, and I despise people who want to make other people's decisions for them. It has been my misfortune to spend much of my adult life in various college towns, where there is a tremendous oversupply of people who claim to dislike technology, admire activism, and love to tell other people what they should think. Ah, well.
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