Steven Paul Leiva - Traveling in Space

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Steven Paul Leiva - Traveling in Space

Unabridged AudioBook | 2014 | Genre: Science Fiction | English | ISBN-13: 9780615478500 | MP3 64Kb | Length: 14 hrs and 23 mins | 408.73 MB

 

A unique science fiction first-contact novel told from the aliens' point-of-view; a 21st-century Gulliver's Travels with Homo sapiens as the Lilliputians. The last thing the factfinders - who call themselves Life - expected to find while traveling in space in The Curious on a mission from their planet, The Living World, was other life. But one day they stumble upon the third planet out from a backwater sun and find it teeming with a vast diversity of life, including one sentient and cognizant, if primitive, species that they dub: Otherlife. Being not only from The Curious but inherently curious themselves, they begin to study the Otherlife and their alien culture, discovering such strange things as: marriage, intoxicating drinks, weapons of minor and mass destruction, the gleeful inhaling of toxic substances, two-parent families, layered language, genocide, non-nude bathing, and - the strangest thing of all - religion. This first contact between Life and Otherlife, disconcerting for both, has moments of humor and moments of horror - and neither escape the encounter unchanged.

 

The book's satirical force is generated by contact between two mutually baffled intelligent species: a bunch of extraterrestrial aliens traveling in space far from their home world; and human beings here on Earth, whom they encounter and try to understand. This opens up all sorts of possibilities. The aliens are not bug-eyed monsters, but humanlike beings from a vastly older, technologically superior civilization. They immediately strike Earth men and women as physically gorgeous and fascinating. For their own part, they find us equally fascinating ... though physically repulsive.

 

Many of the aliens' encounters with human beings are downright funny. They see the idiocy of many of our institutions and practices, whether it be religion, war, or prudishness about the body. As the narrative continues, however, and they are confronted by the facts of race hate and genocide, the satire takes on a different tone. The aliens still struggle to understand what they're seeing, but the denunciation grows more bitter (even when the horrors are filtered through the perceptions of the aliens, who examine human conduct in a rather clinical way).

 

All of this is familiar, of course -- many authors have used contact with earthly or extraterrestrial aliens to satirize the ways of human beings -- but Traveling in Space takes on an extra layer of complexity as the aliens themselves change, in one way or another, in response to their interactions with us, and as some aspects of their civilization are also shown to be corrupt, unjust, and unsavory. If, as readers, we started out thinking that the aliens were a noble, uncorrupted people who make humans seem like yahoos by comparison, we soon learn that the situation is not at all so simple.

 

Both species have something to learn from contact with each other, as it turns out, and the most important learning takes place on the aliens' side. Complications such as these give us much to think about.

 

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