Everywhere: Volume I of the Collected Short Stories and Novellas of Ian R. MacLeod by Ian R. MacLeod

Author:Ian R. MacLeod [MacLeod, Ian R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781625674418
Publisher: JABberwocky Literary Agency, Inc
Published: 2019-08-02T16:00:00+00:00

Afterword

Some stories come in a rush. Others take years, or decades. Some, promising though their basic idea might seem, never arrive at all. “New Light…” belongs very much in the second of these groups. I’d don’t know why it came to me, but I had this vision, early in my twenties when I’d only just got back into writing, of this lonely guy tending a SETI installation in some pretty but remote spot. The idea, or at least the image, never went away, but it was a couple of decades before it started to take proper form. Then it did, indeed, come in a rush, and I still reckon it as one of my best works.

Terr was, I suppose, the missing ingredient. That, and Tom Kelly’s age and alcoholism. He wasn’t some lonely young guy (as I’d always imagined) tending his signal receiving equipment; he was a lonely old guy, with a whole life to regrets to look back on. I’d also read up a great deal more about SETI and the Drake Equation by this point, too, or at least enough to bluff my way through.

The years that have now gone by since I wrote this story in the mid-nineties have, to a certain extent, been positive ones when it comes to the search for intelligent life beyond Earth. Comets have been shown to be dirty snowballs stuffed with many of the building blocks of life, some of the satellites of the outer planets look like promising havens, and most amazingly of all, many planets in life-friendly zones have been found in other star systems. Then, and still, there’s always Mars, even if, for good or ill, we’ve have to give up on the idea of finding ray-gun touting Martians hiding behind those red rocks.

But, at least if seen from the viewpoint of hoping to find intelligent life, it could be argued that things have actually taken a turn for the worse. If, as now seems increasingly likely, life is common in the universe, the lack of any evidence that at least some of this life has reached conscious intelligence, and then found the ability to send out signals we could detect, or provide some other kind of sign, seems more puzzling rather than less. In other words, if the evidence pointing in the direction of life being fairly common the universe is increasingly persuasive, Enrico Fermi’s question about the lack of contact with intelligent life becomes more pertinent than ever: “Where are they?”

If I was pressed to give my own personal view, however, I do reckon that alien intelligences are out there. In fact, they may even be here. But they are probably so very different to us, and so much more advanced, that their attempting to engage with us would be like me trying to have a meaningful conversation with an octopus. Or, perhaps, an ant. In fact, they may not even be “alive” or “conscious” or even “intelligent” in the crude sense that we (who clearly know very so little) think of such things, or see the universe in anything like the way we see it.

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