Crystal Gong: "Dear Chuck Wendig: Meat Squeaks"

Dear Chuck Wendig: Meat Squeaks

By: Crystal Gong

There is certain appeal to the otherworldly and unknown.

As humans, we are equipped with an innate sense of curiosity, which is arguably a good or bad thing. We are continuously searching for life beyond our little oasis in the universe, because having only one planet capable of supporting living creatures is obviously far too few. We want to announce our existence to the universe (“HELLO, WE ARE HERE, please reply if you get this message”) and we wait avidly wait for a response, hoping to one day to come in contact with an alien race. What will happen if we do? Peace treaty? Nuclear war? Total annihilation?

Aliens exist (for now) purely in works of fiction, specifically speculative fiction. James Gunn makes distinctions between two genres of speculative fiction in “Towards a Definition of Science Fiction”. Science fiction is a “literature of change” while fantasy is a “literature of difference”. The lines between these genres can become blurry, but what’s important is that both allow for the investigation of the interesting and the troubling. There are over a billion words in the English language: endless combinations of twenty-six letters, spaces, and symbols, and endless possibilities for characters, stories, plotlines, and destinies.

In The Martian Chronicles, Ray Bradbury explores some of these interesting and troubling ideas through the implications of humans on an alien planet. His work forces us to look at the way humans interact with each other. A thought-provoking piece of social commentary, The Martian Chronicles also explores what is fundamentally human and alien. Robert Silverberg’s “Passengers” presents another view of aliens – as beings that steal the bodies of humans for the sole purpose of pleasure, leaving humans with only broken fragments of memories. This piece forces us to confront the troubling idea of not having ownership of our thoughts and behaviors, and most importantly our minds. Terry Bisson’s “They’re Made Out of Meat” flips the tables of alien depictions. Neither the main character nor the point of view is human, instead the story is told through the conversation of two aliens on the incredible existence of humans a.k.a “sentient meat”. Our general existence as slabs of flesh and bone is quite mind-blowing; hey they are sentient robots!

Sometimes, we are confronted with the idea that the universe can be cold, hard, and unforgiving. Maybe it’s just through our grind of daily life, maybe it’s thorough the short story, “Cold Equations” by Tom Godwin. In this story, a pilot finds a stowaway girl aboard an Emergency Dispatch Ship, who he is required to eject for the sake of gas conservation. That’s pretty scary – how one little mistake can lead to such dire consequences.            

Fiction does not need to be strange or wayward or revolutionary to make us think. However the use of aliens, unicorns, androids, and talking animals, does serve to put our world in a different plane and pushes us to draw contrast and comparisons out of the text. We can break out of our walls of security and comfort because this is not real life. Through fiction we can explore it all – without ever leaving the couch.