Maybe this is a bad time to write science fiction.
Especially if it has anything to do with space aliens.
Let me give you a quick update. I’ve had major surgery to remove cancer, and I’m recovering, but also, as a complication, I developed pneumonia, and I’m recovering from that as well.
The good news is I’m doing okay. So no doom and gloom here, just healing and taking it easy. The cancer is gone. I’m very grateful to the doctors, surgeons, and the surgical robot that did the procedure. If they’d done it the old way, I’d probably still be in the hospital.
Modern medicine = 1
Cancer = 0
While recovering, I binge-watched a lot of news about UAP’s (aka UFO’s), including the entire senate hearing, which put into the congressional record that the United States has recovered spacecraft not of human origin, as well as non-human biological remains. Before watching the hearing, my opinion was that this was nothing but the United States conducting psychological warfare with Russia and China to make them think the US has alien tech. After watching (and, I must admit, rewatching) the Senate hearing, I just … I just don’t know.
My father was a pilot for most of his life, and he claimed that he’d seen UFOs several times, especially during and right after WWII. He’d seen “foo fighters,” and I’m not talking about the band. He said UFOs are out there, and they’re real, and he’d seen them with his own eyes.
As a kid, I believed him.
As an adult, I thought they were tall tales.
Now I believe him again. And I have to tell you, for real, this messes with my brain.
My dad is long gone now. So is my brother. He, too, claimed to have seen UFOs, as he’d been in airplanes with my father — years before I was born, back in the 1950s — and unfortunately he developed a growing obsession with them. His behavior became erratic at one point, and he took me on long drives through dirt roads in his Cadilac, treating it like a Jeep, as we searched for a secret UFO base he knew was out there somewhere.
I humored him and worried about him. Being his much younger brother, I was only along for the ride and always tried to talk him down when he started getting too crazy. I only learned much later I was dealing with someone suffering from a serious drug addiction. Now when I see a tweaker acting crazy, I recognize the behavior as something I’m all too familiar with.
Because of this, my belief in UFOs as alien spacecraft fell to an all-time low. Yes, I wanted to believe. Yes, I never doubted there were alien civilizations out there somewhere. But I associated it with a craziness that hurt me to think about.
But now, I don’t know what to believe.
As an author who occasionally writes science fiction, the subject of UFOs affects me directly. My latest book will become mildly outdated if it turns out we have irrefutable evidence of space aliens. Not that big a deal, though, as I’d have to rewrite a few sections to accommodate that and then rerelease the book. But it will have a major effect on the book I’m working on now — the first draft of which is nearly finished.
The irony is, this is the one thing I never thought would outdate a science fiction story. I’d thought a planet-killing asteroid strike was more likely than the government coming out to say, “Oh, yeah, well you see … that whole Rosewell thing? Yeah, it’s all true.”
Mind blown. WTF.
But, the “government” has not yet come out to admit that, just very credible witnesses. So I’m kind of in a holding pattern right now, to see which way it goes, before I start on the second draft of this novel. Because of this, I’m leaning more toward shelving this book for a while, and working on a new magical realism novel.
If the government comes out and says, “Oh, yeah, by the way, gods and magic are all real too,” then I’m just going to give up writing fiction.
Anyway, I hope this finds you well. Until next time…
Take care,
Jerry