The Space Gods

The Crystal Invaders

In Joseph J. Millard's "The Crystal Invaders," the protagonists are bodiless creatures of "concentrated pure energy" which by feeding on the nervous energy of people arouse in them emotions of fear and hatred. (source)

The Kac'hin Intervention

I've never read anything written by Joseph Millard. According to Gohrlay, Millard's analogue in the Ekcolir Reality was named Thanu (a common name of Etruscan origins in that Reality) and she wrote extensively about the pek and the Huaoshy.

A short-run television program called The Kac'hin Intervention was inspired by Thanu's novel, The Space Gods.

According to Gohrlay, in the Ekcolir Reality an effort was made to create confusion about the relationships between various alien influences on Earth such as the Kac'hin, the Fru'wu, the pek and the Huaoshy.

The Space Gods

In The Space Gods, Thanu presented her theory of how the human species was created by the Huaoshy. She developed the idea that the Huaoshy evolved in an alternate universe of ten spatial dimensions and then created our universe (with only three spatial dimensions) as a kind of simplified computer model of Reality, one in which they could move their Kac'hin agents around, back and forward through Time.

Alien Investigations

In both The Space Gods and The Kac'hin Intervention, the pek were depicted as the shape-shifting adversaries of the Kac'hin. Thanu did not depict the Kac'hin and the pek as good or evil, rather, they were conceived as "entertainment" and a way to bring primitive creatures like humans towards a stage of cognitive and social development where they could recognize their relationship to the gods (the Huaoshy).

Alien Detective

Thanu told the story of The Space Gods through the eyes of a character named Hathnil, a human who becomes aware of the existence of the Huaoshy even before she is born. In the story, Hathnil was "instantiated" by the Kac'hin because the Huaoshy "god" who created our universe is bored with 3-dimenional life forms and close to shutting down our universe. Hathnil takes up the struggle to create a future for humans exploring the universe, an exciting future that will please our Huaoshy "god" and allow our universe to continue to exist.

Crossing Over

In The Kac'hin Intervention, the pek play an important role by preventing the Kac'hin from pushing humans too quickly towards dangerous technologies. When I mentioned to Gohrlay that Hathnil sounds like a character who lives a life that is similar to Gohrlay's, she admitted that the Hathnil character is based on what Thanu was able to learn about Gohrlay herself.

The Earth Saver

Thanu also published a series of stories about Interventionist agents from Luk'ru and their missions on Earth. Although the agents were all aliens (modified Kac'hin), they could pass for human and worked under the cover of the Richard Hunt detective agency.

in the Ekcolir Reaily
original cover art by Earle Bergey

Readers never saw Richard Hunt appear in any of the alien detective stories. The agents from Luk'ru were often working to provide advanced technologies (such as the super-strong material required for space elevators) to the people of Earth while avoiding a cadre of mysterious Overseers. The agents from Luk'ru could usually stay a step ahead of the Overseer by making use of their advanced nanite technology. The agents from Luk'ru all carried guns, but they did not fire ordinary bullets. Instead, they shot nanites that performed various functions such as temporarily immobilizing people or erasing their memories.

Next: the origins of Western religion in Deep Time.

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Cities in the Sea

December 1950

In my previous blog post, I mentioned the Earth-Space war of the Ekcolir Reality. That war followed an explosion of the human population that came after First Contact and was fueled by alien technology. Among the "gifts" of the Fru'wu to Humanity was the material known as "spandazzy", which made possible the proliferation of arcologies both in Earth's oceans and in outer space.

Cities in Flight
The Astounding cover shown to the right is from 1950 and it illustrates what might by the most famous science fiction idea of James Blish: flying cities. In this blog post, I explore how Blish fit into the previous Reality and why that fit was so much better than what our own universe had on tap for the Blish analogue.

Hall of Fame stories

Back in the 1970s, I was exposed to the fiction of Blish and his flying cities through The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume Two which is also the anthology where I read Theodore Sturgeon's "Baby Is Three". I've previously mentioned that I was also impressed by the humor in a story called The Spectre General which was in that volume.

In The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume One I read another Blish story, 'Surface Tension', along with Clarke's
'The Nine Billion Names of God'. Blish's 'Surface Tension' might have been my introduction to the idea of intelligent microscopic life forms, but the story's silliness so outraged me that I never read anything else by Blish until 'A Case of Conscience' at the end of 2020. You can read 'Surface Tension' at the Internet Archive as it originally appeared in Galaxy magazine.

I know that I read "Earthman, Come Home" in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, but it made no great impression on me. I went off in the direction of reading science fiction writers like Asimov, Clarke and Vance; Blish was abandoned.

There is a huge risk in writing science fiction stories that start by taking some mundane aspect of Earth history and re-imagine it in the context of interstellar travel. Blish's flying cities are the Sci Fi analogues of "migratory workers of the Great Depression of the 1920s and '30s".

In the Ekcolir Reality (click image to enlarge).

I don't want to read science fiction stories in which humans have life-extension technology and live many centuries and travel across the galaxy and yet they still lead miserable lives like the poor people who survived the Great Depression.

In the Ekcolir Reality
Original cover art by
Jos van Uijtrecht

Caves of Nanites
My preference would be for a science fiction story that introduces some imaginary technology (such as a technology that allows for "flying cities") and then goes on to show an imaginary future in which people's lives are actually different in some interesting way from our lives here on this backwards little planet.

In the Ekcolir Reality, with Earth under the influence of the Fru'wu Intervention, economic expansion was the rule. The human population grew very rapidly and our planet's vast stores of fossil fuels were relentlessly exploited.

in the Ekcolir Reality (source)

Gohrlay has been telling me about the science fiction genre as it existed in the Ekcolir Reality. Gohrlay suspects that the analogue of Blish (named Jamie) in the Ekcolir Reality was provided with insights into the future of Earth by her replicoid.

In the Ekcolir Reality.
Original cover art by Paul R. Alexander

Jamie Blish wrote a series of stories about the decline of New York City starting with its flooding during the first phase of sea level rise in the 20th century and continuing on through its existence as a mostly-submerged metropolis after the melting of the antarctic ice cap. Over And Out was a science fiction adventure dealing with the construction of the first space elevators and orbital cities.

Next: Investigative Science Fiction in the Ekcolir Reality

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