Journey to Year 1,000,000,000 Ch. 23

It was very hard to get a sense of what life in such a distant future would be like. Consider how short the existence of humanity has been (only about 200,000 years, according to current science). Consider how short the existence of science fiction speculation has been (perhaps a little over a century). Now consider how short a human lifespan is (75 or so years). How can one person, living a few short years, have any idea how humanity will evolve over millions? It's an incredible task to take on...

.....which is why I did it. I don't pretend to know what life will look like in a billion years. But I hope I've written an entertaining story, based on a few trends I've noticed in my short, short existence:

1) Humans have gotten smarter. Undeniably, humanity has become more "civilized" and technologically advanced, in a rapidly accelerating pace.

2) Humanity has become more collectivized. We have given up more and more of our rights to a central authority, which tells us more and more not only what we can do but what we can say and think. I imagine over time that centralization will continue.

3) Science has helped our bodies become "smarter". Medicines help our bodies fight illnesses. Smart medicines target cancers while leaving the rest of the body untouched. Over time I suspect that we will gain more and more control of our bodies on an organic and cellular level.

All these trends could lead to something like the octopus creatures with the self-aware cells of the year 500,000,000 or beings made of self-aware atoms of the year one billion. Both are metaphors for the road humanity seems to be taking.

It was still a tough story to figure out. Figuring out the aliens was a tiny piece; I needed a story.

If I made the story true to form, the motivations of the aliens would be unrecognizable and unrelatable. In traditional fiction (and science fiction), people are motivated by power, desire for women, and ideology. So on the meta level, I made this the exact same kind of story as every other story you HAVE ever read, by keeping the motivations on a relatable level. However, the specific plot details were decidedly different, with stories of aliens with tremendous powers searching for answers about the nature of evolution and the reason for being. In that way I presented both a fresh and relatable story.

But once I figured out the outline, connecting the dots was easy. I grinded out this massive 200,000 word book in just a little over two weeks, plus a few days for outlining and revision. On my best day, when I was distracted with three other tasks, I still wrote more than 18,000 words, and nearly all of what you read here was written in the first draft. As a rule, all my books are done nearly completely in first drafts, with a second reread for grammar and consistency.

This book had sensuality in it. A lot of it, and more than I initially planned. One of the themes of classic science fiction is aliens experimenting on attractive women. We were supposed to read sensuality in it by the fact that beautiful women were held captive and had things done to them... but it was never explicit in those 1950's stories. I decided to make it explicit. For a time I wondered if I put too much alien sensual experimentation in the book. But when I read it over, I realized everything had its purpose. Obongo being coerced into having sex with Jennifer helped set up the story arc which split Taylor from Jennifer. Taylor being coerced into having sex with Jennifer is a dramatic cap to this story arc--giving him what he always wanted, but in a way he didn't want. The other sexual encounters also helped advance the storylines. While they were prolific in number, they were also purposeful, and each helped to advance the story in some way.

I learned two very important lessons from reading (and rereading) Game of Thrones. The first is to have many characters each with different relationships with each other. Game of Thrones carries this to an extreme, to the point where you almost need a spreadsheet to keep track of who was who. I tried to use this strategy in this book to create a web of relationships between Taylor, Jennifer, Elizabeth, Pam, Pam, Suki, and Vincent (yes, I purposefully wrote Pam twice).

The other lesson I learned from Game of Thrones is to give each major character a dramatic event which defines how they relate to others later. Jaime Lannister's was the killing of his king; Tyrion's was being born and killing his mother; and Bran's was when he was pushed out of the window. In this story, for Jennifer and Taylor, it was their night in the cave, and later, Jennifer's first sexual encounter with Bongo Obangida; and for Taylor and Pam, it was the day she broke up with him. Having a dramatic event helps shape their relationships and gives it some depth.

Pam, future Pam, is a lot like Guardian of Piri from Space 1999, or Lieutenant Ilia (the bald chick) from Star Trek: The Motion Picture, an alien in the form of a human who gradually discovers her humanity, which, of course, is the major theme of the latter part of this book. (Only in my version, Pam has larger tits--much larger tits--than Ilia. And she is not bald or Indian, not that there's anything wrong with that). Victor Berman ­­­­­­is a tribute to Victor Bergman from Space: 1999. Babangida was a military ruler of Nigeria; I liked his name because it had "bang" in it. Doctor Elizabeth Weir was the scientific leader of the expedition in Stargate Atlantis; she was pretty, but so sexually repressed that in three years she never once got laid. The author A. Bertram Chandler wrote a series of novels about the "Survey Service", space explorers, which were mostly not very good... but at least he tried to write something different... and I did like the name Survey Service.

The cover was supposed to be similar to the actual The Guardian of Piri from Space: 1999--She wore a really sexy dress in that episode, and I simply improved on the concept. But I couldn't get a good view of her face, and in the end concluded that she simply wasn't so beautiful after all, so I went with another face... while still keeping the (slightly sexed up) dress. The Guardian of Piri was a robot representing a society so far advanced of our own that they couldn't be understood, a beautiful woman who had no understanding of emotions or feelings.

Xetan (Christopher Lee!) was the guardian of the mystical book of knowledge (which was only filled with mirrors) from the movie Circle of Iron. Commander Gorksy, the commander of the Devonshire who Taylor relieved, was also the Commander of Moonbase Alpha in Space 1999, who was also relieved by John Koenig, the main character there.

The big headed aliens are a tribute to the same ones from the Star Trek episode "The Cage". Such an interesting idea--aliens taking a handsome man and pretty woman captive and making them, well, you know... but of course on 1960's TV they could only hint at what I had the freedom to write about.

Isaac Asimov wrote a book called Foundation's Edge about a super evolved society where everyone was part of a group consciousness called "Gaia", even the plants and animals on the planet. The story even had a robotic fuckbot who seduces one of the main characters. Asimov was a far left winger, and was giving us his idea of a future communist utopia, as far left wingers sometimes do. The story was boring, of course, filled with typical Asimovian "talk, don't show", but there was a kernel of an interesting idea in there, which is where I got the idea for the group society of the year 1,000,000,000 where everything is alive.

Part of this story was inspired by Stranger in a Strange Land, written by Robert A. Heinlein. A human is raised by Martians and then comes to Earth. He gets a tremendous culture shock and slowly learns what it is to be a human being. He also has super freaky powers... kind of like Pam! In Stranger in a Strange Land, Michael Valentine, the main character, starts a religion based on (you guessed it) group sex. Then he volunteers to be slaughtered, and his friends eat him. Not making this up. The book is loaded with pages and pages of boring philosophy and a lot of preachiness.

But the idea of someone from a different culture coming and learning what it means to be human was an interesting one, and in many ways that is Pam's story. The "sex religion" part was the most interesting part of the poorly written book, so naturally, I had to do something more creative with the concept.

So I took bits and pieces of ideas from Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Stranger in a Strange Land, and Foundation's Edge, filled in my own details, and, most importantly, made an entertaining story of it. All of these sources I mentioned could have been good stories on their own--their problem was execution and exposition. Execution and exposition are everything.

The scene where Taylor walks in on his own funeral? Watch the ending scene from Capricorn 1.

Those of you who have read my erotic horror novel Parasites Love Earth will recognize the pancakes on the backs; and those of you who have read my other erotic horror novel Earth Girls Under Mind Control From Planet P will recognize the mentions of Us. Those of you who haven't read them and go on to might think those concepts originated in this book; but those were written first.

Oh, and the last scene in the book? Inspired by the movie Xanadu, where some guy gets the hots for Olivia Newton John, who's some kind of singing goddess who is also a cock tease; at the end of the movie she leaves the guy to go back to wherever she came from, which would make for a sad ending, except a waitress suddenly appears who looks EXACTLY LIKE Newton John at the very end. The jilted boyfriend, getting a gleam in his eyes like he wants to bang her right then and there, grabs her and yells, "I want to talk to you!" Talk, heh heh heh.

Gary L.M. Martin

PS Michael Taylor returns in "The Making of a Survey Service Captain" and "Starship Gods" and "Darwin's First Law", and "God's Middle Managers" and at least one more book I'm working on now....

Author's followup note 12/2/20

It may interest you to know that when I sold this as a book it was at the top of Amazon's "Scifi Erotica category" (even though it isn't really erotica per se) for weeks, and selling more copies than all my other books combined... at least, as of one year later. I've learned a lot in the past year, so I went back in and added a few thousand more words. What was changed? Nothing substantial; mostly I zoomed in on the sex scenes and added a stronger emotional component.

Gary