What To Read During the UFO Hearings
Aug 10 2023
For the past few weeks, Congress has held hearings about unidentified flying objects (UFOs), raising many people’s childhood dreams of alien visitations. I’ve been reading about aliens for my entire life, and it was time to update my UFO bookshelf.Whatever you think about these hearings, it has to spark your imagination!“The U.S. is concealing a longstanding program that retrieves and reverse engineers unidentified flying objects, a former Air Force intelligence officer testified Wednesday to Congress,” writes the AP about these landmark hearings. “The Pentagon has denied his claims.”
Explore my UFO hearings book list on Fable!
Would you get on a flying saucer?
The first book I picked up since the UFO hearings was “Extraterrestrial” by Avi Loeb. Written by an astronomer at Harvard, this nonfiction book lays out a theory that our solar system was recently visited by advanced alien technology from a distant star. Loeb tells the story of scientists who glimpsed an object soaring through our inner solar system, moving so quickly that it could only have come from another star. The author shows us that it was not an asteroid, raising a new explanation: the object was a piece of advanced technology created by a distant alien civilization. This thought-provoking book poses a hypothetical scenario where aliens land in your backyard and ask if you want to take a one-way trip to their home planet. Would you do it?Personally, I’d have to pass. I’ve got my kids and my wife down here on Earth. But if it had happened before I had a family, I would have jumped on that flying saucer!Reddit discusses extraterrestrial life
Over at Reddit, readers started imagining a world where aliens are real, and their existence is disclosed to humanity. They debated how this world-altering event would affect literature.Should authors include aliens in their stories, or could they write them off as a minor detail? I loved this discussion and collected some of my favorite perspectives shared by fellow book lovers.One commenter, ActonofMAM, suggested that the disclosure of aliens could lead to exciting new plotlines in literature. They sketched out a murder mystery where a minor character is an alien, yet their presence does not impact the solution to the crime.Instead, the coroner uses an analysis tool based on alien technology. I agree that discovering extraterrestrial life could completely revolutionize every genre, especially detective stories!“Depending on the specifics of disclosure, it could lead to all kinds of new interesting plots becoming available. But once the novelty wears off, I expect that many or most books will just incorporate it into the world like any new change.”
The redefinition of science fiction
Throughout the history of science fiction, we’ve tended to imagine aliens as threatening. The xenomorphs of the Alien franchise have given me nightmares for years! I watched Aliens this summer, and I cheered as Ripley wiped out swarms of xenomorphs.Read the novelization of Aliens on Fable!
On Reddit, one reader raised a fascinating question. In a world where aliens exist, would having an alien character automatically make a book science fiction? According to this reader, if aliens became a regular part of our lives, authors could incorporate them into various genres without necessarily categorizing their work as science fiction.“What exactly is sci-fi when aliens are involved? Is it not that the journey to discovery is what the sci-fi is about, or is it solely about the aliens? I guess that’s where we can determine whether aliens are sci-fi or not. Next question we can ask, when space exploration is possible, what will sci-fi become?”
As a counterpoint, CaptainColdSteele wrestled with the definition of science fiction versus fantasy. They explained that if aliens are discovered, stories featuring them would no longer be classified as science fiction, but rather as fiction, unless they recount the histories of the extraterrestrial beings. Here’s the complete definition they used:“I took a sci-fi lit class in high school and my teacher told us that the difference between science fiction and fantasy is that sci-fi deals with technology that hasn’t been scientifically proven impossible yet. Fantasy deals with things scientifically proven impossible like magic.”
Humans need stories
No matter how our extraterrestrial visitors changed literature, our longing for storytelling would still be a part of human culture. Stories have always played a significant role in our lives, and it is unlikely that they would disappear with the emergence of new technologies or realities.“I think a need for stories is built into us. If that’s true, then the only way we’d no longer need stories is if we evolved into a species that didn’t, or if we somehow engineered the longing for them out of ourselves (which I think would be sad).”
What kind of book would you write if we knew that aliens existed? This is a question we may have to answer someday. Even if aliens never land in my lifetime, I will never stop imagining a world where they do!Keep reading on Fable!
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