I’m writing a science fiction novel, so it’s not a bad idea to read the stuff. This is the sort of research I enjoy. I can’t imagine writing a genre I don’t enjoy reading, too.
A couple of years ago, I found Voyagers by Ben Bova. It was a freebie on my Kindle. It’s also a first-contact novel, so I was really curious how the author did it.
This novel is very much a product of its time. There’s lots of early 80s cold-war paranoia and old-school tech. I can deal with that. However, female characters are products of the 50s. The young and smart FMC basically had to sleep with older men to be taken seriously. Yuck. I’ve read a few other 80s novels with regressive female characters. Most of those were sci-fi too. I wonder why that is?
Keith Stoner (aka, Gary Stu) being always right was also starting to annoy me. Research is a slog sometimes.
Otherwise, plot and prose weren’t too bad and it was free, so I kept going. Sometime after the fourth instance where Keith was right (it was only chapter 15), I stumbled onto this…
“What’s wrong?”
“The signals,” Jo said, breathless with agitation. “They’ve stopped!”
“What?”
He bolted from his chair, banged his shin on the corner of the desk and hurried downstairs with her.
The big room was strangely quiet. No one else was there; the night shift wouldn’t come on for another hour. The big electronics consoles hummed softly to themselves. The tracing pens were strangely still, inking out dead-straight lies on the graph paper that unrolled slowly beneath them.
Thompson dashed around the cluster of desks in the middle of the room, found a headset and plugged it into the proper console. He clapped one earphone to the side of his head.
Nothing.
Only the background hiss of the universe, laughing at him. The radio pulses were gone.
Doctor Thompson (PhD, not MD) just found out the alien radio signal he’d been tracking went poofers. So yeah, he’s having a bad day. So was I. Here’s what I’d already written for my novel…
“Okay Beck, the gang’s all here. I’m putting you on speaker.” He pushed the handsfree button. “Can you hear me?”
“Loud and clear. I texted Rudy and got no response. We still have the signal, unmodulated.”
“Okay, my dish is moving into position. Let’s see what’s out there.” Darryl switched on the radio, tuned it to 1420.405752 megahertz, and found… nothing. There was no signal at all, only the hiss and soft static of the universe laughing at him.
Voyagers was published in 1981. That’s more than forty years after my laughing universe. Uh oh.
Since then, I’ve found more than a few similarities between my work and others. In most cases, the other works had been published decades before anything I wrote.
A few months ago, I told a friend of mine about my dilemma. He said not to feel so bad because it’s all been done before. It’s tough to be original. So I responded, “I guess it’s true… there’s nothing new under the sun.”
Anang kind of froze and I saw the gears moving. He was thinking hard on something. A few seconds later he figured it out and shared with me.
“The phrase is from the Bible. It’s the prophet Ecclesiastes.” He found the NIV (New International Version) of the Christian Bible online and showed me Ecclesiastes 1:9…
What has been will be again.
What has been done will be done again.
There is nothing new under the sun.
Well, damn. What I thought was a fairly modern idiom was in fact written around 450BC.
Kohelet (Ecclesiastes is the Greek name) had already thought about this a long time ago. My dilemma is anything but new – or even original.
I’m not religious like my friend, but we talked about Ecclesiastes and the Bible for a while after that. I learned that wisdom is feminine in ancient Hebrew. It’s patient, observant, and reasoned. I’m sure wisdom’s gender isn’t unknown to at least some of you, but it was unknown to me. And maybe there’s a lesson. Something may not be new, but it could be new to someone.
So I applied this new wisdom to remix the 2,400-year-old idiom into a modern one. Here was my newer take…
There is nothing new under the sun,
but there are newer suns.
It’s fresh and catchy and about thirty years late. An internet search returned a nearly identical quote from Octavia Butler…
There is nothing new under the sun,
but there are new suns.
I can’t catch a break. Even so, an ancient prophet has my back. Ecclesiastes 1:10…
Is there anything of which one can say,
“Look! This is something new”?
It was here already, long ago;
it was here before our time.