I shared about Blades of the Fallen by Ross Harrison last month! Something unique about this book and series is that it is not centered around humans. There are human-like creatures who are could be considered gods in our world. I was intrigued by that world building in a whole new universe that is not touched by humans much. To learn more, I have Ross Harrison sharing about this! Enjoy!
A Universe without Humans
By Ross Harrison
Fermi’s Paradox has always been a source of great debate and spooky musings: in a universe so mind-numbingly vast, where it’s a statistical improbability that humans are the only life, where is everyone? Are we alone? Are we being studied? Are we being ignored like we ignore ants? Are we some backwater planet other life never goes to? Are we one of many, but the only ones who don’t know the danger of sending out signals that paint a target on us?
When I started my space opera series, I didn’t think about what the answer to this would be (I was twelve, and I hadn’t even heard of Fermi’s Paradox, apart from anything). But the answer provided itself: aliens basically don’t care. My universe – set in a mostly-explored Milky Way teeming with life – is so full of different alien species that they just don’t care anymore about new and upcoming spacefaring species like humans. As a matter of due diligence and security, they all take a look at one point or another as the space-faring evolves, and this inevitably results in saying hello and “you aren’t warmongers, are you?”, but in such a populated galaxy, a new species appearing on the galactic stage is met with about as resounding a round of applause as the discovery of a new type of fish.
As a human writer with human readers, having human characters is an obvious starting point; however, the very nature of worldbuilding means that natural questions arise about what the other, older species have been doing while humans were bashing things with rocks and scaring themselves with fire. In the second book in the series, there is a kind of flashback to an alien invasion that occurred 53,000 years earlier. But flashbacks and exposition must be relevant to the story, and what isn’t said, the history that isn’t told, could potentially cover millions of years.
This is a universe that has been getting on with its own business without humans perfectly well, and that has to be taken into account. Humans can’t be the be-all and end-all in a galactic community of which they are one of the newest members. An interesting idea that comes up in a universe like this is just how similar and different are the aliens? How do they perceive humans? The natural answer to that is to start writing about some of those aliens. Aliens have always featured heavily in the books, unsurprisingly, but it wasn’t until book three that we went to alien worlds from the sole perspective of alien characters, and humans had nothing to do with it. Humans became the aliens. In book three, and its direct sequel, we see how similar aliens can be because, at the end of the day, they are all just people.
Perhaps the most obvious similarity between humans and many of the alien species in this galaxy is the physical one. Some people have scoffed and looked on this with scorn because it’s a trope, it’s naive or ignorant, it makes no sense, but I always liked the idea of a subtle, background mystery of why aliens from across the galaxy share so many similarities. Why are they bipedal? Why do they smile when they are happy and cry when they are sad? Why can some of them even eat a few of the same foods? Does someone, somewhere know why, and if so, why haven’t they said?
Although I never intentionally use alien species and situations as an analogue for our real world, it is pretty inevitable that familiar themes arise – people who find some trivial reason to believe they have superiority over other people, thirst for power, excitement and fear, love and hate. I don’t pretend to be some kind of psychology expert navigating my way through the human psyche by using aliens as a mirror to humanity, but simply by virtue of writing these alien characters as people, we naturally see reflections of ourselves to some degree.
But all that isn’t to say that humans have no look-in, no influence. One example of this is in book three, where the main characters are Necurians, a species present in the other books but not truly looked at until this one. Necurians are psionically powerful, with abilities like telekinesis and telepathy. As such, I had to think about what kind of weaponry these characters – inquisitors of the Vanguard, the Necurians’ police and military – would carry. They have no need of ranged weapons, but should they encounter one of their own, they can’t rely on psionics alone. The obvious choice, then, would be some kind of energy sword they can switch on and off. After realising I’d given them lightsabers, I rethought things and gave them normal swords instead. But when some Necurians got careless on a trip to Earth, they encountered samurai. The encounter was handled poorly and blades were drawn. In their retreat, a Necurian sword was shattered by a katana. The shock and respect resulting from that encounter sparked long research into the fascinating wielders of those blades, and the Necurians chose to abandon the swords they borrowed from warmongers and instead adopted the katana, an elegant symbol of honour. They ensure that the Vanguard never forgets that they are only borrowing the katana, and they teach its origin and the meaning it held to those it truly belongs to.
The galaxy may not be full of this kind of human influence, but even in a galaxy where humans are not the strongest, or the most advanced, or the smartest, they still have a place, they have still earned some respect, and they are still only getting started.
So while humans might not feature too heavily in this galaxy, I find it interesting to not only see those occasional tendrils of human influence, but also to see how much of what we think of as human nature is reflected in other species.
Hope you enjoyed this guest post by Ross! Connect with him on Facebook, Twitter and Goodreads. Click on the graphic below to read my review of Blades of the Fallen and explore the universe he mentioned above.
Banner Image by Reimund Bertrams from Pixabay
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