From Russia with Bots

Xenophobia

I almost called this blog post 'Xenophobia'. Apparently there is a novel called Xenophobia, but I've never read it. And a film, too. Sadly, many science fiction stories about First Contact are dominated by xenophobia.

I often blog about how silly it is for writers to take some feature of human civilization (like our fascination with war) and simply extrapolate it to space aliens. Alien invasion stories are a good example of this. The folks in Hollywood seem to have learned that you can always make another pile of $$$ by making yet another alien invasion flick. If there ever is a First Contact alien invasion of Earth, I hope the first thing the aliens say is: "Take us to your money".

Parthney vs Bots from Russia!

I often think of the Exode Trilogy as a Second Contact story. In the Exodemic Fictional Universe, space aliens first arrived at Earth long ago, perhaps 2 billion years ago. In Exode, humans discover that we only exist because of the efforts of our "alien invaders". "Second Contact" is when human finally realize that we were created by aliens.

I've previously had fun imagining Parthney as a kind of Hollywood secret agent like James Bond.

secret agent clone

In the poster to the left, I imagine the romance between Parthney and  Kach as taking place against a Hollywood backstory of nefarious Russian cybercrime.

I sometimes amuse myself  by  imagining that Overseers keep watch over this blog, preventing the Editor from revealing too much about the aliens who watch over Earth. What if the Observers suddenly discovered this blog? Here are some data from google.com for traffic to the Blogger service coming from Russia:

Click on the graph (above) to enlarge.

wikifiction.blogspot.com

You can see that on October 9 a new pattern began and by October 12th traffic to the Blogger service from Russia had almost doubled over the early October baseline level.

Recent traffic to this blog is shown in the graph to the right. On October 9 traffic to this blog increased dramatically and by October 12th traffic to wikifiction.blogspot.com was about ten times normal.

After the 12th, traffic dropped, but this site is still getting more traffic from Russia than any other country.

Traffic map: dark green = more traffic.

It never used to be that way. This blog has always in the past gotten most of its traffic from the United States.

Does anyone know why Blogger blogs are suddenly of greater interest in Russia?

Likely suspect.

It would be more fun if the Overseers were behind the sudden increase in traffic to this blog.

Next: more science fiction from Deep Time.

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