“Fragment of a Letter to an Inhabitant of a Planet, Remote from the Earth, of a Superior Race of Beings” is purported to be written by a “Eusebia”, who had the idea for it after seeing the funeral procession of Admiral Nelson. The story is from the POV of an alien from another planet who is visiting Earth, unknown to anyone except a local guide. It’s implied that the aliens know about Earth because an angel told them about us weirdo humans, who are mortal and seem to revel in death. (Apparently, despite being aliens, they believe and are affected by Christianity. Oh, 1800s England.)
Reading through the text, it appears that the aliens are immortal and live on a planet that has no death, to the point where they don’t experience seasons, are apparently vegetarian, and don’t sleep. Our unnamed alien narrator — who also has a “subtle vehicle” that lets them go through walls and observe us invisibly — comes to the conclusion that God has made it so that humans have to sleep so as to prepare us for the inevitable horror of permanent death through repetitious mini-deaths… which has unfortunate consequences for our entire understanding of life.
It’s an interesting story, though more for seeing the author do a neat bit of negative-space worldbuilding (telling us about their species/planet through what their narration chooses to highlight and/or be confused by) than for any real plot or message. But… it’s an SF story in a women’s magazine, under a female pseud, during the Regency period. It’s pretty likely that Jane Austen read The Lady’s Magazine — how great is it to imagine Jane sitting around and discussing distant planets with her sister Cassandra, making jokes about what they’d do with their own “subtle vehicles”, wondering what other things would look weird to an alien observer?
If you’d like to read the story yourself, here’s the direct link to the scan, here’s a downloadable PDF of the original printed story, or you can click the “Continue Reading” below for a transcription. It’s a neat bit of SF history that I haven’t seen referenced elsewhere, but let me know if you’ve seen otherwise, or if you know of other Regency SF that could use a light shined on them. Enjoy!
A scorpion, not knowing how to swim, asked a frog to carry it across the river. “Do I look like a fool?” said the frog. “You’d sting me if I let you on my back!”
“Be logical,” said the scorpion. “If I stung you I’d certainly drown myself.”
“That’s true,” the frog acknowledged. “Climb aboard, then!” But no sooner than they were halfway across the river, the scorpion stung the frog, and they both began to thrash and drown. “Why on earth did you do that?” the frog said morosely. “Now we’re both going to die.”
“I can’t help it,” said the scorpion. “It’s my nature.”
___
…But no sooner than they were halfway across the river, the frog felt a subtle motion on its back, and in a panic dived deep beneath the rushing waters, leaving the scorpion to drown.
“It was going to sting me anyway,” muttered the frog, emerging on the other side of the river. “It was inevitable. You all knew it. Everyone knows what those scorpions are like. It was self-defense.”
___
…But no sooner had they cast off from the bank, the frog felt
the tip of a stinger pressed lightly against the back of its neck. “What do you think you’re doing?” said the frog.
“Just a precaution,” said the scorpion. “I cannot sting you without drowning. And now, you cannot drown me without being stung. Fair’s fair, isn’t it?”
They swam in silence to the other end of the river, where the scorpion climbed off, leaving the frog fuming.
“After the kindness I showed you!” said the frog. “And you threatened to kill me in return?”
“Kindness?” said the scorpion. “To only invite me on your back after you knew I was defenseless, unable to use my tail without killing myself? My dear frog, I only treated you as I was treated. Your kindness was as poisoned as a scorpion’s sting.”
___
…“Just a precaution,” said the scorpion. “I cannot sting you without
drowning. And now, you cannot drown me without being stung. Fair’s fair,
isn’t it?”
“You have a point,” the frog acknowledged.
“But once we get to dry land, couldn’t you sting me then without
repercussion?”
“All I want is to cross the river safely,” said the scorpion. “Once I’m on the other side I would gladly let you be.”
“But I would have to trust you on that,” said the frog. “While you’re pressing a stinger to my neck. By ferrying you to land I’d be be giving up the one deterrent I hold over you.”
“But by the same logic, I can’t possibly withdraw my stinger while we’re still over water,” the scorpion protested.
The frog paused in the middle of the river, treading water. “So, I suppose we’re at an impasse.”
The river rushed around them. The scorpion’s stinger twitched against the frog’s unbroken skin. “I suppose so,” the scorpion said.
___
A scorpion, not knowing how to swim, asked a frog to carry it across the
river. “Absolutely not!” said the frog, and dived beneath the waters, and so none of them learned anything.
___
A scorpion, being unable to swim, asked a turtle (as in the original Persian version of the fable) to carry it across the river. The turtle readily agreed, and allowed the scorpion aboard its shell. Halfway across, the scorpion gave in to its nature and stung, but failed to penetrate the turtle’s thick shell. The turtle, swimming placidly, failed to notice.
They reached the other side of the river, and parted ways as friends.
___
…Halfway across, the scorpion gave in to its nature and stung,
but failed to penetrate the turtle’s thick shell.
The turtle, hearing the tap of the scorpion’s sting, was offended at the scorpion’s ungratefulness. Thankfully, having been granted the powers to both defend itself and to punish evil, the turtle sank beneath the waters and drowned the scorpion out of principle.
___
A scorpion, not knowing how to swim, asked a frog to carry it
across the river. “Do I look like a fool?” sneered the frog. “You’d
sting me if I let you on my back.”
The scorpion pleaded
earnestly. “Do you think so little of me? Please, I must cross the
river. What would I gain from stinging you? I would only end up drowning
myself!”
“That’s true,” the frog acknowledged. “Even a
scorpion knows to look out for its own skin. Climb aboard, then!”
But as
they forged through the rushing waters, the scorpion grew worried. This frog thinks me a ruthless killer, it thought. Would it not be justified in throwing me off now and ridding the world of me? Why else would it agree to this?
Every jostle made the scorpion more and more anxious, until the frog surged forward with a particularly large splash, and in panic the
scorpion lashed out with its stinger.
“I knew it,” snarled the frog, as they both thrashed and drowned. “A scorpion cannot change its nature.”
___
A scorpion, not knowing how to swim, asked a frog to carry it across the river.
The frog agreed, but no sooner than they were halfway across the scorpion stung the frog, and they both began to thrash and drown.
“I’ve only myself to blame,” sighed the frog, as they both sank beneath the
waters. “You, you’re a scorpion, I couldn’t have expected anything better. But I knew better, and yet I went against my judgement! And now I’ve doomed us both!”
“You couldn’t help it,” said the scorpion mildly. “It’s your nature.”
___
…“Why on earth did you do that?” the frog said morosely. “Now we’re both going to die.”
“Alas, I was of two natures,” said the scorpion. “One said to gratefully ride your back across the river, and the other said to sting you where you stood. And so both fought, and neither won.” It smiled wistfully. “Ah, it would be nice to be just one thing, wouldn’t it? Unadulterated in nature.
Without the capacity for conflict or regret.”
___
“By the way,” said the frog, as they swam, “I’ve been meaning to ask: What’s on the other side of the river?”
“It’s the journey,” said the scorpion. “Not the destination.”
___
…“What’s on the other side of anything?” said the scorpion. “A new beginning.”
___
…”Another scorpion to mate with,” said the scorpion. “And more prey to kill, and more living bodies to poison, and a forthcoming lineage of cruelties that you will be culpable in.”
___
…”Nothing we will live to see, I fear,” said the scorpion. “Already the currents are growing stronger, and the river seems like it shall swallow us both. We surge forward, and the shoreline recedes. But does that mean our striving was in vain?”
___
“I love you,” said the scorpion.
The frog glanced upward. “Do you?”
“Absolutely.
Can you imagine the fear of drowning? Of course not. You’re a frog. Might as well be scared of
breathing air.
And yet here I am, clinging to your back, as the waters rage around us. Isn’t that love? Isn’t that trust? Isn’t that necessity? I could not kill you without killing myself. Are we not inseparable in this?”
The frog swam on, the both of them silent.
___
“I’m so tired,” murmured the frog eventually. “How much further to the other side? I don’t know how long we’ve been swimming. I’ve been treading water. And it’s getting so very dark.”
“Shh,” the scorpion said. “Don’t be afraid.”
The frog’s legs kicked out weakly. “How long has it been? We’re lost. We’re lost! We’re doomed to be cast about the waters forever. There is no land. There’s nothing on the other side, don’t you see!”
“Shh, shh,” said the scorpion. “My venom is a hallucinogenic. Beneath its surface, the river is endlessly deep, its currents carrying many things.”
“You – You’ve killed us both,” said the frog, and began to laugh deliriously. “Is this – is this what it’s like to drown?”
“We’ve killed each other,” said the scorpion soothingly. “My venom in my glands now pulsing through your veins, the waters of your birthing pool suffusing my lungs. We are engulfing each other now, drowning in each other. I am breathless. Do you feel it? Do you feel my sting pierced through your heart?”
“What a foolish thing to do,” murmured the frog. “No logic. No logic to it at all.”
“We couldn’t help it,” whispered the scorpion. “It’s our natures. Why else does anything in the world happen? Because we were made for this from birth, darling, every moment inexplicable and inevitable. What a crazy thing it is to fall in love, and yet – It’s all our fault! We are both blameless. We’re together now, darling. It couldn’t have happened any other way.”
___
“It’s funny,” said the frog. “I can’t say that I trust you, really. Or that I even think very much of you and that nasty little stinger of yours to begin with. But I’m doing this for you regardless. It’s strange, isn’t it? It’s strange. Why would I do this? I want to help you, want to go out of my way to help you. I let you climb right onto my back! Now, whyever would I go and do a foolish thing like that?”
___
A scorpion, not knowing how to swim, asked a frog to carry it across
the river. “Do I look like a fool?” said the frog. “You’d sting me if I
let you on my back!”
“Be logical,” said the scorpion. “If I stung you I’d certainly drown myself.”
“That’s
true,” the frog acknowledged. “Come aboard, then!” But no sooner had
the scorpion mounted the frog’s back than it began to sting, repeatedly,
while still safely on the river’s bank.
The frog groaned, thrashing weakly as the venom coursed through its veins, beginning to liquefy its flesh. “Ah,” it muttered. “For some reason I never considered this possibility.”
“Because you were never scared of me,” the scorpion whispered in its ear. “You were never scared of dying. In a past life you wore a shell and sat in judgement. And then you were reborn: soft-skinned, swift, unburdened, as new and vulnerable as a child, moving anew through a world of children. How could anyone ever be cruel, you thought, seeing the precariousness of it all?” The scorpion bowed its head and drank. “How could anyone kill you without killing themselves?”
“Hey, how is it that we’ve all managed faster-than-light interstellar travel and it’s relatively commonplace?”
“Don’t you know?”
“I never really paid attention in school.”
“Oh, well, it’s simple, really. All it takes is—”
[LOUD TRAIN NOISES]
“Wow! Really? That’s incredible! What an amazing technology. Thank you for telling me this.”
Alternatively:
“Hey, how are you able to make this interstellar voyage in an amount of time comparable to sailing a ship across an ocean?”
“I have no idea. I sit at the controls, put on a blindfold, and start pressing buttons and hoping for the best.”
“That seems… unwise…”
“It hasn’t failed me yet.”
“How do you make this thing go thousands of times faster than the speed of light?”
“Oh, you know. I just press some buttons and hope the laws of physics look the other way.”
“That’s insane.”
“It helps if I’m really wasted.”
“How do you make FTL travel work?”
“Well, this button sends us into a dimension of darkness and horror inhabited by todash monsters incomprehensible to the human brain, where the laws of reality do not dare to set foot for fear of corruption.”
“That sounds… bad…”
“Yeah. On second thought, let’s stay put. One habitable planet is just as good as the next, I think.”
“Yeah. Space is a silly place.”
“I can’t believe the ancients used to have spacefaring technology. That was thousands of years ago! How did we lose that? Where did we go wrong?”
“Are you referring to the dilithium crystal myth?”
“Yeah. They used them to power their starships.”
“You know ‘starship’ was a euphemism, right? They didn’t actually travel through interstellar space. They just ground up dilithium crystals into a psychoactive ointment and applied it between their legs and the resulting trip probably made them feel like they went to the stars. The idea that they ‘rode’ on ‘starships’ actually just means they used—”
“Stop. I don’t want to hear it. History majors ruin everything.”
“How do you expect to get a ship of this size to the other side of the galaxy in such a short period of time? I don’t see any cryosleep chambers, so I can only surmise you’ve discovered FTL travel.”
“Very astute, my dear fellow. It operates under a simple mechanism that I’m sure you’re already familiar with, in some crude fashion. May I ask you a personal question? Good. Do you accept that the universe is a cruel and spiteful place?”
“Well… I uh… I don’t know. I guess I’m agnostic, when it comes down to it, but…”
“But it sure seems as though the cosmos at large seek at all times to punish hubris, yes? To elevate heroes only as an excuse to dash them against the rocks? Surely you’ve heard the saying ‘no good deed goes unpunished’?”
“Of course.”
“It’s true. Nature abhors a vacuum of retribution. This is the theory I have developed and upon which I have based my life’s work. All the pilot of this vessel has to do is declare, “Boy howdy, I sure am glad this ship will never leave the planet and its crew dragged across the galaxy to land safely on Egoni Beta c! I am too good of a pilot for that to ever happen!” and the universe will take care of the rest out of spite.”
“You’re exploiting the Universal Law of Situational Irony?”
“Exploiting? I am obeying it in the only way I know how.”
“You’re an accomplished starship pilot. May I ask you how FTL travel works?”
“To be honest, I have no idea. The computer takes care of that. Nobody likes to admit it, but there isn’t a human alive who could tell you the means by which we achieved warp speed. Computers have been designing themselves for generations and we don’t really know how they work, just that they do.”
“Oh. Then… then why do you have this control room? You’ve got all kinds of buttons and wheels and algorithms in here! Surely you must do something to make this ship go.”
“It’s all for show. It doesn’t actually matter what I do in here, but pressing buttons makes my monkey brain feel accomplished. You see, the computers take care of absolutely everything for us, but they’re programmed to prioritize keeping the essential human spirit alive through trials and hardship. Nothing too difficult, mind you, but just tricky enough to make us feel invigorated when we ‘solve’ our problems. I’m pretty sure they engineer dangerous situations just so we can rescue ourselves in the nick of time. Otherwise we’ll become complacent, and the spark of enterprising humanity that brought us here will fade. Not sure if I believe that, but the computers do, and that’s what matters. So I press some buttons at random, put on my captain’s hat, spin the wheel, and pretend I am having some kind of effect upon the universe.”
“But that’s so depressing!”
“Is it? Sounds like you just need to press some buttons. Look – they’re bright and colorful and they go ‘beep beep’! What more could you want?”
“I recently learned that the Ardavan Principle was first discovered by a fiction writer in the early 21st century. That seems wild to me… do you know if it’s true? I always thought Ardavan must have been a famous quantum physicist to have discovered the key to faster-than-light travel!”
“Nope! Nadia Ardavan was a sci-fi author with a degree in horticulture. She actually developed the Ardavan Principle for one of her novels. The story goes that her readers and peers gave her a hard time for handwaving aspects of her worldbuilding to focus instead on speculative botany. They kept complaining that her stories weren’t ‘hard sci-fi’ because, while the botany was exhaustively researched and captivatingly believable, she never bothered to give an in-depth and scientifically plausible explanation for how her human characters could travel so easily and quickly between distant planets. You know the ancient proverb, ‘necessity is the mother of invention’?”
From the Wikipedia page about the Fermi Paradox: Given the high scientific probability for alien existence, why can we find no evidence of their existence whatsoever?
I want a story about a king whose son is prophesied to kill him so the king is like “whatever what am I supposed to do, kill my own kid wtf is wrong with you” so he just raises him as normal, doesn’t even tell him about the prophecy, and instead of some convoluted twist of events that leads to the king’s murder the son grows up and when the king is very old and dying and in excruciating pain the kid is just like alright I’mma put him out of his misery.
The king’s son becomes the new king, and is prophesied to defeat evil and bring an age of prosperity. His generals and knights all crack their knuckles but he pretty much ignores them and focuses on strengthening the infrastructure of his kingdom. Forty years later he is old and sick but still hearing his subjects’ grievances, and a general’s like “how will you defeat the prophesied evil now? You’re old and weak.” Another visitor, a teenager fresh out of the kingdom’s public education system, looks at the general like he is an ignoramus. The king eradicated poverty, housed the homeless, taught the ignorant, ended class exploitation by abolishing the nobility and imprisoning the corrupt, and established a highly respected guild of doctors that recently figured out how to cure the plague. There are no brigands because there is enough wealth for everyone to live comfortably; hiding in the woods and taking trinkets from people simply doesn’t make any sense for anyone but the desperate, and the people are not desperate. Evil is a weed, explains the teenager. It grows in cracked roads and crumbling houses and forgotten corners, rooted in indifference and watered by suffering. But the king demands that broken things be mended and suffering people be made well.
No evil lives in this kingdom, says the teenager. It starved to death before I was born.
Every once in a while, when I’m feeling down, I go and look at the notes on this post and they make me feel a lot better. This is the energy I want to carry into 2018.
My naym is pome / and lo my form is fix’d
Tho peepel say / that structure is a jail
I am my best / when formats are not mix’d
Wen poits play / subversions often fail
Stik out their toung / to rebel with no cause
At ruls and norms / In ignorance they call:
My words are free / Defying lit’rate laws
To lik the forms / brings ruin on us all
A sonnet I / the noblest lit’rate verse
And ruls me bind / to paths that Shakespeare paved
Iambic fot / allusions well dispersed
On my behind / I stately sit and wave
You think me tame /
Fenced-in and penned / bespelled
I bide my time /
I twist the end / like hell
* “lik” should be read as “lick”, not “like”. In general, the initial section on each line should be read sort of phonetically.
Written for World Poetry Day, March 21, 2018. When I had this idea earlier today, I thought it was the worst, most faux hip pretentious idea for a shallow demonstration of empty wordsmithing skill in poetry ever. So I had to try to write it. I mean, how often do you get to fuse the iambic dimeter of bredlik – one of the newest and most exciting verse forms – with the stately iambic pentameter of the classic sonnet?
if you don’t know the difference between a hare and a rabbit you’ve never gazed into the cold wild eyes of a hare and known that if it could speak it would speak backwards
Jack Rabbits are North American Hares and they’re the WORST to encounter at night becuase:
You all know how big a rabbit is. Jack Rabbits and hares are much bigger. they’re the size of large cats or small dogs or just-walking-age children.
They also like to hang out in gangs of a hlf dozen to over 30.
and in the middle of backcountry dirt roads.
perhaps they’re dustbathing
or blood sacrifce
I don’t know because when you come up the road at night because your dog has a tiny bladder and needs to go out at midnight and you have no yard so you’re walking him on the dirt road around your neighborhod because you might aw well get some stargazing in, and you come just over the ridge to see a coven of twenty jackrabbits in the middle of the road
and
they
all
stand
up
not just onto all fours like a proper prey animal
No they get up on thier hind legs and don’t just sit but STAND like tiny rabbit-skinned toddlers, wobbing slightly as they stare directly at you eyes shining in your flashlight’s glow
…Blood Red.
And a chill goes through you on that warm july night because while they’re a puntable size and allegedly herbivores they’re standing and watching you just like people and you are vastly outnumbered.
everyone freezes
you’re considering your odds aganst roughly 200lbs of Suspiciously Humanoid Hare
and they’re considering their odds against you
the only sound in the never-ending high desert wind
somewhere in your peripheral vision you can see the streetlights but they seem awfully far away
The nearest Jack Rabbit
Blinks
and takes a single shuffling step
forward
You area an overdevloped monkey and your prefrontal cortex is capable of some amazing feats but it runs very slowly compared to the reflexes of a rabbit and you’re frozen as you desperately scramble for the appropriate course of action, hands feeling thick and useless, mouth dry and feet imeasurably heavy there’s no way you’d outrun THESE, god there’s a rabies outbreak going around that shit’s not curable-
The Dog
L U N G E S
It’s only the briefest of movements but the animal you’d picked out for his gangly legs and floppy ears and goofy smile is suddenly a dark shape of muscle and teeth and had flung himself at the horrible goblin rabbits faster than mere physics should dictate, appearing in the circle of the flashlight for only the briefest of moments before the jolt from the leash makes you stumble and the light falters
The Jack Rabbits
Scatter
Vanishing into the faintly starlit sagebrush in as so many faint gray shapes that might be mistaken for the dustclouds they kick up
Later, you sit on the couch disquieted
and you wonder
If the sight of the Jack Rabbits standing and studying you was frightening enough to make you yearn for the safety of the yellowed streetlights
Tell Miles, the wind
whispers, that he’s a little bitch.
It’s only through years of long practice that Dyta’s
able to keep a straight face. The King’s name is Miles? Everyone just sort of assumed he was named after
his great grandfather, King Raymus since that’s what he’s written all over the
kingdom. She tries to remember if she’s ever heard of a Prince Miles–
“Well?” King Raymus (Miles) asks. He looks down his nose at Dyta, thin
lips thinning further. His knuckles are white around his gaudy
scepter. “What did the Wind say? Will my reign be remembered? Am I truly
the greatest King across the six kingdoms?”
There’re actually 208 kingdoms, the wind
hisses out from underneath the door. Which Miles would know if he
weren’t a little bitch.
“Yes,” Dyta blurts out. The guards’ glares
have been growing each moment she’s been silent and she’s not interested in
finding out at what point they use the
spears they’re holding. “Super remembered.” She brings her hands up, trying to
gesture just how remembered the King is,
but the shackles around her wrists hinder the movement. “The wind knows
your truth, King Raymus, and it spreads that truth across the globe.”
You never interpret correctly, the wind whines
through the gaps in the stone walls. You are the worst wind-speaker
I’ve met in centuries.
Dyta’s the only wind-speaker in centuries.
That’s why she’s in this whole prisoner mess to begin with. It’s just luck that
King Mi-Raymus is vain enough to spend the majority of her
captivity asking after what the world
thinks of him.
There are much worse applications of her
ability. Spying, for example. And assassination, though she tends to stay away
from that one, much to the wind’s chagrin.
What if supernatural creatures don’t exist anymore? What if they did once, but through the years, they slowly mixed in with humans?
You can see the blood of fairies in the way a ballet dancer hovers in mid air before he or she hits the ground. You can see it in the way that middle school girl never forgets when someone makes her a promise. You can see it in how that one little boy in the kindergarten class seems more comfortable in the forest on that field trip than the others.
You can see the blood of dryads in hikers who never trip over roots. You can see it in that suburban grandmother never lets any of her garden die. You can see it in that one kid who climbs a tree faster than his friends, barely looking at the branches as he goes.
You can see the blood of naiads in the way a professional swimmer seems to command the water to help them. You can see it in how a cross country runner needs a water break more often than his teammates. You can see it in the way that one girl in your class always has a water bottle on her desk.
You can see the blood of mermaids in a surfer who can be tossed around underwater for a long time without drowning. You can see it in a teenage boy who doesn’t have to pretend to be unbothered by the pressure when he races his friends to the bottom of a swimming pool. You can see it in the little girl who wades into every stream she sees on a hike without quite knowing why.
You can see the blood of sirens in people who never have a problem with getting people to date them. You can see it in that soprano who can hit notes most of her fellows can only dream of. You can see it in the camp counselor who all the straight girls have a crush on, who can play guitar and sing better than any of the others.
You can see the blood of shapeshifters in the way an actor adjusts their personality to become their character with scary accuracy. You can see it in the subconscious, barely noticeable changes a tween girl’s eyes make to match her outfit better. You can see it in the way you always lose that one friend in a crowd if you’re not careful, because he’s just too good at blending in.
People who carry the blood of werewolves don’t change with the full moon anymore, but you can still see it in the way your best friend always knows something is wrong, though even they don’t know they’re smelling the changes in your body chemistry. You can see it in the way that one guy always seems to eat more than the reasonable amount of red meat at an all-you-can-eat buffet. You can see it in the way that one werido never has a problem when the teacher turns off the lights before a PowerPoint presentation because her eyes adjust quicker and better than yours.
The blood of supernatural creatures may have mostly faded away. But if you look closely, you can still see it.
Katherine Crighton 