Alien Contact Anthology -- Story #9

If you are new to this blog and are wondering what's up with this Alien Contact anthology (forthcoming from Night Shade Books in November) and this "Story #9" -- you may want to begin here. On the other hand, you could always read on and return to here later....

"The Gold Bug" by Orson Scott Card



This story originally appeared in the July 2007 issue of Orson Scott Card's InterGalactic Medicine Show, an online subscription-only zine -- and is approximately 11,600 words in length.

"The Gold Bug" is part of the Enderverse, the series of stories and novels of Andrew "Ender" Wiggin, which began with the 1977 novelette "Ender's Game," later expanded into the Hugo and Nebula award-winning novel Ender's Game, published in 1985. Wikipedia maintains a chronology of the Enderverse, showing the relationship between the eleven novels and thirteen stories in the series.

I asked Orson Scott Card for some thoughts/background on the story:

When I started my online magazine, Intergalactic Medicine Show, I hoped to promote it by including a new story set in the Ender's Game universe in every issue. That worked for a while -- as long as I could come up with stories I could be proud of. But after a while, I learned that I can't come up with stories on demand.

Then the launch of a comic book series led to the idea of doing an original story in the Ender's Game universe as an original comic book. For me, the comic book form requires that there be a much stronger visual component than in narrative fiction. So I began to think of ways to put humans in contact with Formic technology.

Only instead of having machine-based tech, I thought: What if the Formics did their mining by using specially bred animals? Abandoned machines rust and decay, but what do abandoned animals do? I had my visual, and then searched for (and found) my character.

But I didn't write it as a comic book. I know how to write comic book scripts, but it doesn't give me the sprawling room that I'm used to in fiction. Instead, I wrote this story, exactly as it appears here, and another writer -- Jake Black -- adapted the comic-book script. So in a way, I "novelized" the comic book before it existed.

Then, in writing Ender in Exile, I used characters and situations from this story as part of what happens while Ender Wiggin is on his way to the colony he is going to govern. So this story is an integral part of the Ender saga. But I also hope that even if you know nothing about Ender Wiggin, this story will work on its own merits. Because, ultimately, it's just a cool sci-fi idea.

The Fermi Paradox

Science fiction author and scientist Geoffrey A. Landis writes:

"The galaxy contains roughly a hundred billion stars. If even a very small fraction of these have planets which develop technological civilizations, there must be a very large number of such civilizations. If any of these civilizations produce cultures which colonize over interstellar distances, even at a small fraction of the speed of light, the galaxy should have been completely colonized in no more than a few million years. Since the galaxy is billions of years old, Earth should have been visited and colonized long ago... The absence of any evidence for such visits is the Fermi paradox."

This excerpt is from an article entitled "The Fermi Paradox: An Approach Based on Percolation Theory," published in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, 1998, which Landis later presented at the NASA Symposium "Vision-21: Interdisciplinary Science and Engineering in the Era of Cyberspace" in 1993. The full article is available on the author's website.

I mention this article by way of my own introduction -- just in case you are unfamiliar with the term Fermi Paradox: I am pleased to announce that co-editor Nick Gevers and I have sold Fermi Paradox-themed original anthology, Is Anybody Out There? to Daw Books via Martin H. Greenberg's Tekno Books, for publication in 2010.

Hopefully you will recognize the name of my co-editor, Nick Gevers: he has had a regular short-fiction review column in Locus magazine since 2001; he has written reviews and literary criticism for the Washington Post Book World and the New York Review of Science Fiction, among many other venues. Nick is also an editor for British indie publisher PS Publishing; and, he has had two original anthologies published so far this year: Other Earths (with Jay Lake, Daw Books) and Steampunk! (Solaris Books).

This week Nick and I sent out our first round of formal invitations to authors (we've received only one decline so far!) and we're excitedly awaiting the influx of incredibly fine short stories in the weeks and months ahead. Here's an excerpt from the "pitch" we sent to our authors:

Why is it that, in such a vast cosmos, with hundreds of billions of stars in this galaxy alone, and no doubt billions of Earth-like planets orbiting them, we have found no evidence of intelligent alien life? No evidence that aliens have ever visited Earth (other than discredited UFO mythology), no detectable signals in all our SETI searches with radio telescopes... So: we’re asking for entertaining stories that explore explanations for this enigma, looking seriously or comically at solutions to Fermi’s question. Is intelligent life a fluke, arising only once or twice in the universe’s long history? Does intelligence arise frequently, but with gulfs of time and distance keeping technological civilizations irretrievably apart? Do such civilizations inevitably implode or self-destruct within a few hundred years? Is our definition of intelligence fatally subjective? Are aliens among us right now, unseen? Are there aliens everywhere, but determined not to let us notice them? These, or other hypotheses, no matter how unlikely, should inform contributions to Is Anybody Out There?