Invasion by Luke Rhinehart

Author:Luke Rhinehart
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Titan

TWENTY-NINE

(From LUKE’S TRUE UNBELIEVABLE REPORT OF THE INVASION OF THE FFS, pp. 139–142. Being Molière’s memoir about his writing of his play Love Has No Boundaries.)

Back on Long Island after getting shot up in the Caymans I decided it was time for a change of games. I was losing my enthusiasm for taking on the most powerful government in the history of the earth and having to fiddle around with boring banking and exciting rescue attempts. I decided to write a play.

Playwriting comes easily to FFs. It’s our natural way of being. At home in what Billy charmingly calls “Ickieville” we are playing a variety of roles all the time, the roles often depending on what games we participate in on any given day. We have no “plays” as humans do because they would be redundant. We are acting in plays every moment of every day.

On Earth now we do the same. I, for example, played a French intellectual for three weeks after my arrival, could quote all of Jean-Paul Sartre backwards and forwards, and did a brilliant critique of Emmanuel Carrère’s latest. When I heard from an FF who’d arrived from America about what Louie was doing, I decided to go join the game. But now I was getting a bit bored with stealing money and blackmailing helpless but deserving humans, so decided I wanted to become a Broadway star. Or rather an off-Broadway star, since it takes too long to mount a Broadway play. All I needed was actors and a script, which I would whip off in a few minutes. Money was not a problem.

It actually took longer. Writing always involves first determining one’s audience, and I realized that I was stuck writing this play for humans. I had to limit myself considerably. Like a human writing a play to entertain pets.

The first problem was in using FFs as characters. The only way they could be “real” for a human audience was by their seeming to be human. To work, my play would have to pretend that FFs had human emotions—could love, hate, be jealous, greedy, angry. Well, all play involves pretending so I would create human FFs.

Then there was the problem of the appearance of the FFs in the play. I realized that for humans the changing shapes of FFs was fun. My FFs would have to be continually changing their shapes and apparent beings, and often appear in various mostly human shapes.

Next there was the genre. Since we FFs consider all human beings to be fools, there was really only one genre available for my play: farce. And how appropriate: my French friends had given me the name ‘Molière’ and here I was suddenly deciding to write a farce!

Finally, there was the story. All good human plays stick to the basics: love, hate, rivalry, jealousy, lust, and greed. I’d have to fill the play with all the most powerful human emotions. What I’d do is create a few characters, some human, some FFs, throw them into a dramatic situation, and let nature take its course—human nature of course.

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