A Deep Dive into Oceanus

OK, the title of this post is mainly a pun I just couldn’t resist (the novel is largely set in a prototype habitat at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, after all). Oceanus is my newest novel, scheduled to be published May 4, 2024. You can read a sample chapter here and it’s available to pre-order—use this Universal Book Link to find it at your favourite online bookstore. But if you want to know more about Oceanus than just the tongue-in-cheek back cover teaser, here we go.

I’m a writer who starts with a theme or concept, usually both, and builds my characters and plot to serve those. At the time I conceived Oceanus I’d written a few science fiction thrillers and was in the mood to try something more like an adventure (though the line between the two is blurry). I love scuba diving, and there are a few great SF stories that take place in the ocean depths, but not nearly enough. It was time for me to take the plunge. And as possibilities swirled in my mind, a couple of strong themes called out to be explored.

One theme was the way humans tend to dismiss intelligences other than our own. There are a lot of other smart creatures in this world, from whales and dolphins, apes to crows, and the list goes on, and we just don’t know how smart they really are because our intelligence tests don’t fit their mental processes. But I’m convinced we shouldn’t underestimate other forms of life just because they don’t think like us.

You can see this play out in Oceanus: a passenger jet is struck by a powerful blast of unknown energy over the Pacific. The energy has either come from the ocean or was aimed at the ocean, but the ‘where’ doesn’t seem as important as the ‘from whom?’ Could it have been produced by some previously unknown Earth life? Nobody thinks that’s likely, so the other strongest possibility is intelligent aliens from another world.

The first person brought into the picture is the main character, Alex Rhys, a gifted freelance troubleshooter (think MacGyver but not so gadgety), because a creative approach will be needed to save the jetliner passengers and time is running out. But as Alex stays on to investigate the phenomenon, he’s solidly on the side of believing advanced extraterrestrials have come to Earth. And Alex thinks that’s a good thing—he figures humans have screwed up our planet so badly that we need outside help to save ourselves. So, you could maybe articulate another main theme of the novel as: “Should we look to someone else to solve our problems?”

Will a visit from aliens make everything right? That’s one of several deep questions explored by the characters as they physically descend into the utter blackness and hellish pressure at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean searching for answers. Oceanus is definitely a thinking person’s action tale.

I’ve always loved SF stories that feature a team of exceptional specialists brought together to solve a crisis. In Oceanus the cast of characters includes a reluctant telepath named Elle (Alex and Elle are the ones on the Oceanus cover), an experienced Navy diver named Gary, a brilliant engineer named Lee-Anna, plus a couple of men with exotic adaptations to address physical challenges: Mattheus, a sociotheologist (I might have made that up), and Bheru, a xenobiologist.

Quite a team. In a very dramatic setting. Facing a world-threatening emergency.

SO many things I love in a science fiction story.

I hope you’ll love it too!

Get a taste of the opening of the novel here, or use this link to pre-order your copy of Oceanus.

A BRAND NEW NOVEL ON THE LAUNCHPAD!

Creating a novel has its highs and lows. Realizing you’ve got an exciting story concept is one of the highs. Remembering how much work is ahead of you is one of the lows!

Once you reach the point of publishing the novel, it’s a mix of the two: you’re excited about the prospect of people meeting your new baby, and you’re also afraid that it won’t find the audience it deserves.

For now, let’s focus on one of the happy parts: announcing the pending arrival and showing off those first adorable photos to the world at large.

OK, enough of the baby metaphors.

I’m thrilled to announce that my newest novel Naïda is written, revised, polished, edited, and ready to launch. And here’s your very first look at the eye-catching cover. I had no idea how my cover artist was going to come up with a visual analog of the story’s concept, but I think he’s knocked one out of the park. I hope you love it too.

Naïda begins as the story of Michael Hart, who discovers a strange structure at the bottom of an isolated northern lake and knows it’s definitely not of this Earth. But he can’t stay away. And that choice will change his life completely, and forever.

As the book blurb says,

It will make him a hero. Or the greatest traitor the world has ever known.

Because he is no longer alone, not even in his own body.

There is another.

Naïda.

The novel is an earnest attempt to explore the trauma of a First Contact, the question of what it means to be human, and to predict one possible future for humanity beyond our home planet. But at the same time, it offers the pure fun of a superhero origin story. I think you’ll fall in love with its cast of characters and get a big kick out of going along for the ride.

Publication date is set for June 1, 2021, barring unexpected delays, and I’ll update this post once the book is available for pre-order. Expect a great price promotion and giveaways too!

So keep watching this space and get ready to meet…Naïda.

HOW DO YOU SOLVE A PROBLEM LIKE AN E.T.?

NASA, JPL

In my last blog post I looked at some of the reasons it’s not surprising that we haven’t yet discovered signs of life elsewhere in the universe. Life signs are hard to unequivocally identify as such, because other things might be the cause. Alien species might be so different that we can’t recognize the energy signatures or communication transmissions their societies produce. And space is so incredibly vast that our search efforts have covered only a miniscule portion of even our own galaxy.

But let’s say we ultimately succeed. What will we do if we encounter life on other planets and in other solar systems? Will we protect it? Exploit it? Or destroy it out of fear of contamination, or simply because it’s in our way?

The questions get even bigger when it comes to advanced, sentient life forms. Will we look at them as friends or enemies, benefactors or threats? It’s much too facile to say that it will depend on how they treat us. We should know ourselves well enough to understand that what we bring to a relationship, on whatever scale, is what we’ll probably take from it. When Europeans arrived in North America, some looked for harmonious cooperation with the indigenous peoples and got along well with them (though their arrival still wasn’t good news for the original inhabitants). Others sought to conquer and subjugate, and immediately made enemies. And that was among fellow humans. Concepts like friendship, kinship, cooperation, loyalty, duty, authority, and many other critical social dynamics may have no equivalent at all in an alien culture, or radically different applications and priorities. We can’t know ahead of time, so does that mean we shouldn’t prepare at all?

No, that would be foolish. Even though alien mindsets are by definition hard to predict, we have to try. Even more importantly, we need to be clear about our own motivations, and establish strong rules about how we will behave regarding alien life at all levels of development. Just as the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 forms the basis of how we deal with local space bodies, we need similar laws to be established governing our interactions with alien life forms. We need this before we make such a discovery. It’s no good locking the barn door after the horse is gone. Whether the aliens we discover are benevolent, malevolent, or ambivalent, our relationship with them will get off to a better start if we can demonstrate that our species abides by strict laws that ensure we’re not reckless aggressors or exploiters ourselves, and that we’ve built a good foundation toward understanding and cooperating with others.

Where would we begin to formulate possible responses to extraterrestrial life forms, in all their potential variety? Laugh if you like, but I think a great start would be to gather all of the human/alien encounter stories in science fiction and evaluate the interactions described in them! Who has given more thought to such scenarios than us? It would be a large task, I admit, but so is scanning 33,000 light years of space.

Speaking of which, although SF stories over the decades have gradually prepared our minds to accept the idea of alien species, those depictions haven’t all been positive, to say the least! Conclusive evidence of a civilized race beyond our planet would panic many people and send shockwaves through our global economy. Even the most optimistic of us won’t be able to totally shrug off movies like Alien or Independence Day. So we have to prepare ourselves and our society for that reaction—if we can’t, then we shouldn’t be in such a hurry to draw attention to ourselves. For the past century, we’ve been spewing radio and TV signals out into the cosmos like a giant locator beacon. Even worse, much of its content would give an observer the impression that we’re unrelentingly warlike and violent. We can’t call those signals back, but maybe it’s past time to find a way to block them from going beyond our atmosphere (although internet-based entertainment sources like Netflix are helping).

I’m all in favour of passively searching for signs of life in space. I am most definitely not in favour of deliberately calling attention to ourselves. Let me simply ask: if the native North Americans of the 15th Century had suspected that there was even one chance in a hundred that the arrival of Europeans on their shores would have the effects it did, would they have built big signal fires on the beaches inviting one and all to come and visit? (They didn’t—it’s a metaphor for what some scientists suggest we should do, which is just incredibly naïve.)

It might not be possible to ever fully prepare ourselves for First Contact with an alien species. Lets not blindly rush into it!

There’s another reason that might explain why we haven’t yet detected signs of civilization elsewhere, and it’s a disturbing one. It’s possible that, once species advance in technical knowledge to the point where they can control planet-changing chemical processes (like human carbon emissions) and hugely destructive energies, they may destroy themselves. If that’s true, and inevitable, or even quite common, the span of time during which their civilization might be detectable from light years away could be quite short. Humans are now capable of annihilating ourselves, but that’s only been true for a century or so. What if most highly-advanced technological societies don’t make it much longer than that? Consider that we’ve only had instrumentation capable of scanning the heavens over multiple wavelengths of light and radio frequencies for a half-century or thereabouts. If there were an advanced civilization radiating lots of energy into space from a solar system fifty light years from Earth, they would have to have been doing so within the past century for us to even know they existed. And only if their radiations were aimed this way, and if we were looking in the right place!

What if, when we venture out into interstellar space, we encounter the remains of such extinct cultures? Science fiction is full of such things, from Clarke’s Rama, to Niven’s Ringworld, Pohl’s Gateway technology, to the Stone from Greg Bear’s novel Eon. Scientists (and SF fans) get excited about what we could learn from alien civilizations, dead or alive, that would advance our technological capabilities. If you ask me, there are deeper lessons that are much more important for us to learn. Such as how such cultures interact peacefully with others. And how to survive our own ever-increasing planet-killing powers.

We want to know if we’re alone in the universe. Okay. While we’re looking, let’s do everything we can to prepare ourselves for the answer.