In science fiction, aliens who come to Earth are usually scary and menacing, aspiring to destroy, conquer, or even eat mankind. But the aliens in Karen Lord's The Blue, Beautiful World aren't interested in conquering or destroying; they're interested in inviting Earthlings to join a Galactic Council.
It turns out, however, that humans need a little time and training before they're ready to assume the responsibilities of galactic citizenship. And complicating matters is the fact that humans might not be the only Earth dwellers to receive the aliens' invitation.
It's not surprising that water and oceans figure prominently in Lord's novel. As a Barbadian writer, she has a lifelong respect—and fear—of the water.
From the episode:
Rob Wolf: We meet Owen at the beginning of the book. He is a pop megastar, but unlike most megastars of today, who expose their every breath on social media, he's a bit of a mystery. Tell us a little bit about Owen. Who is this mysterious pop star?
Karen Lord: My first reaction is "spoilers." It's going to be so hard to talk about Owen, but let's talk not so much about who Owen is as what Owen is capable of. He is someone who has absolutely tons of charisma. The talent is there, but the talent is not outstanding. But there's this amazing charisma, and one of the things I have really noticed about history—I notice even about the present day—is that people with charisma can be really dangerous because they can get some things done that you just would not expect. I will leave the readers to discover for themselves Owen's background and why that's so important. The whole journey that Owen has and the temptations that he faces, I found that fascinating.
RW: In addition to Owen, the story involves a group of young people who've been recruited to be trained as diplomats for a global government. They're at first not sure why a global government needs diplomats since, under one government, there will no longer be nations with separate interests. Why is the knowledge that they gain during their training so important to what unfolds in the story?
KL: In the introduction, you mentioned "the aliens have always been here," which is a lovely trope that keeps recurring in science fiction. Another trope that keeps recurring, and that I have always enjoyed, is the "young person plays a game and discovers that the game is a cultural tool to introduce them to aliens who actually exist." This is my take on that, although it's not, strictly speaking, a game; it's really their teaching module where they're like, 'Oh, here's a random scenario. … How do you deal with this? How do you analyze this? How do you assess this?' At first they don't take it very seriously because if you're on Earth and you don't think other populated planets exist with intelligences that could interact with ours, it's a bit of a silly exercise, isn't it? I mean, you understand that it has some kind of meaning on some level, but you're not taking it as real. This was something that I could have a lot of fun with, especially when they do start to realize, much to their horror, that it is entirely real.
RW: That ties into another theme—the notion of what's real and what isn't real. This is a world where there's a lot of interaction occurring in virtual reality, and there's a company that change the way you look, change your identity. There's also times when people are dreaming or are awake but still feel like they're dreaming. It's a beautiful mosaic of the way people can interact and experience the world, but it makes me wonder, and some of the characters also wonder, how can they tell what's real and what isn't, what is true and what isn't. It seems very relevant to the way we live today and some of the issues we're confronting. So what are you telling us? And what are your characters experiencing by living in this kind of environment?
KL: I did indeed sort of riff off of the dilemmas we face now with, as you say, deepfakes and AI voices and the rest of it. But, as you point out, there's also an almost supernatural or spiritual element where sometimes in their dreaming or in a waking moment, there's other dimensions going on. There's still non-mechanical, non-computer, non-digital aspects of reality that are not something that we can fully trust.
As to where I was trying to go with that, I think sometimes we all have to take a step back and understand that everything that we see as the world and as reality is mediated through our five senses. Even between humans, we don't really, literally experience the world the same way.
So sometimes what becomes important is not so much the extent to which your reality is … real, but more whether if it is shared. It's the sharing of the reality that makes it more powerful than the question of whether it's real or not.
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Karen Lord is a Barbadian writer of speculative fiction. The Blue, Beautiful World is her fifth novel. Her previous books are Redemption in Indigo, which received the William L. Crawford and Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature and was nominated for the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel. That was followed later by a sequel, Unraveling. While The Blue, Beautiful World is considered a standalone story, it is set in the Cygnus Beta universe, which is where two of her previous books, The Best of All Possible Worlds and The Galaxy Game, are also set.
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