The Aliens of Orion

Posted by mdepierres

Some of you may remember that Dr Thea Boshoff wrote her PhD thesis about my Sentients of Orion series. Her thesis is entitled:

Crafting positions: representations of intimacy and gender in The Sentients of Orion.

Well, Thea just contacted me to say that she’ll be presenting a paper called *The Aliens of Orion* at a conference in Lisbon. The main theme of the conference is what it means to be human. Thea’s paper shows how the progression in my depiction of aliens reflects a progression in the nature of humanity.

Here is the poster from the conference. Giant lobsters. What is not to love?

Wish I could be there!

It’s finished!

Posted by mdepierres

My new short story is finished and for the moment it’s called ‘The Echo of Love’. It still needs a bit of tweaking but I managed to successfully get most of my dream down on paper. It’s the first time I’ve ever done that – dream to story. It was a weird experience. The dream left me with a lingering sense of loss and disconnection which was impossibly hard to translate. And like most dreams it didn’t make sense. But I remembered it two years later and became obsessed with the idea that it should become part of the Sentients of Orion universe.

So please tell me, have you ever written a story based on a dream? I’d love to hear about it.

Tardigrades Make the Best Aliens

Posted by mdepierres

In the Sentients of Orion series, I use tardigrades as my aliens. As you can see here on Astronomy Picture of the Day website, they truly are perfect for it. Here is why I picked them – in APOD’s words:

“Is this an alien? Probably not, but of all the animals on Earth, the tardigrade might be the best candidate. That’s because tardigrades are known to be able to go for decades without food or water, to survive temperatures from near absolute zero to well above the boiling point of water, to survive pressures from near zero to well above that on ocean floors, and to survive direct exposure to dangerous radiations. The far-ranging survivability of these extremophiles was tested in 2011 outside an orbiting space shuttle. Tardigrades are so durable partly because they can repair their own DNA and reduce their body water content to a few percent. Some of these miniature water-bears almost became extraterrestrials recently when they were launched toward to the Martian moon Phobos on board the Russian mission Fobos-Grunt, but stayed terrestrial when a rocket failed and the capsule remained in Earth orbit. Tardigrades are more common than humans across most of the Earth.” (taken from APOD site)