Re: "Whoops! It's Earth!"-noodling
- From: "Logan Kearsley" <chrono.surfer@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 27 May 2006 02:57:07 GMT
"Nicholas Waller" <testo888@xxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1148652487.941777.24860@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
was
Logan Kearsley wrote:
"wow! so this alien planet is /actually/
Earth in disguise!", which was cool maybe the first couple of times it
todone but doesn't work so well anymore, and isn't what I want this story
be like at all.
The first one of those I remember is an Edmond Hamilton story, in which
three astronauts investigate some ruins on a dead world. They decide to
pay their formal respects to the departed race of beings whose
civilisation was destroyed, and one them says, sombrely (something on
the lines of) "We stand here, we three bird-men of Rigel" and ruffles
his feathers. I forget the title... "The Dead Planet", perhaps. I was
shown it when I was about 8 by my brother and was duly impressed.
As a teenager I accordingly wrote my own, which ended with the
description of a photo taken on the relevant planet's natural
satellite, an unreadable-by-our heroes plaque which reads, of course,
"Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the Moon". Whoops!
as you say.
I've used that trick once. But mine is an inscription on an ancient building
that the protagonist is about to discover is actually still in use.
When I finally rewrote it and sent it out (Sandtrap in Interzone 187) I
buried any obvious evidence that we were dealing with the earth. The
denouement still took place on a (the) moon, and I did mention a large
single moon in the opening paragraphs, but that's about the only clue
it was earth. I didn't describe any land masses: the planet was an
oceanless desert (called Churned) and almost every trace of life and
humanity gone (or suppressed) - apart from an artificial tunnel carved
deep into a nuclear waste storage dump. The moon has a subselenean
moonbase, but every other trace of us - such as the Apollo lunar
landers - had been pummelled into the lunar surface by micrometeorites
in the preceding billion years.
You are supposed to know it's Earth, but it's not supposed
to come as a surprise, and apparently mentioning the presence of some
obscure Earthling tree isn't enough of a clue-in.
In the end, I didn't mind if people didn't guess it was supposed to be
earth, and I don't know whether they did or not.
I wouldn't really, but as it is it would be very hard to avoid at the very
least strongly hinting that this is Earth at the end of the story, so I
really want to make it clear beforehand to avoid it looking gimmicky.
But a clear description of the moon and its "face" - which I avoided -
might have tipped the balance more. You could do that, and if your
story takes place anywhere near the sea perhaps you can talk about the
tides (and waves) advancing and receding on the shore as they have done
for hundreds of millennia, grinding and pounding the rocks and
everything else to sand and grit in such a way that it sounds like
earth: are there still seagulls, for instance? Do your land octopuses
think about the sea whence they came?
Hm. The sea might be within several hours travel. But the lantopodes don't
really think of themselves in connection with the sea anyway. They've been
on land for much too long.
-l.
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