I had a bit of a brainstorm session today, looking at possibilities for future stories. One of the areas I am going to explore is science fiction erotica, probably with a bit of a BDSM twist because, well, I like that sort of thing. However, when it comes to science fiction, I like mine to be realistic – that is, I like it based on real science, and not just be a fantasy story with ray-guns. I like fantasy too, but I like to keep it as fantasy. If it’s magic, it’s magic and magic follows it’s own internal rules; if it’s science, it bares a relation to the science that we know.

Now a frequent theme in many SF stories are alien-human hybrids. It even forms a large chunk of pop-culture both in conspiracy theories about UFOs and in TV and film series like Star Trek.

I have a problem with hybrids.

Alien Sex

Basically, all life on Earth shares a common origin: we all evolved from a common ancestor, a bacterial life-form from some three or four billion years ago, swimming through the oceans of a primordial, meteor and comet bombarded planet. My point here is not how humble those origins are, but that we are related – distantly – to every other living thing on our planet. If there are aliens out there, they will not be related to us at all. Even given the panspermia theory – that once life evolved in one corner of the galaxy it could spread to the rest by chance or design – it means that alien life will be more distantly related to us than any life here on Earth.

Think about that.

While you share around a third of your genes with the plants in your garden, you cannot actually have sex with them (not in a way that would produce offspring, anyway). Any grey-skinned three-fingered big-eyed UFO-borne super-intelligent aliens are going to be more distantly related to you than that. They may not have sex as we know it, they may not reproduce in a way we recognise, and they will almost certainly not have their reproductive equipment in the same place as ours.

By the same token they will probably not use the same kind of proteins, fats, and carbohydrates as us – if they use them at all – so their food would at best be inert to us and at worst be poisonous.

So basically, if there are aliens, we won;t be loving them in more than the platonic sense.

Interesting Aliens

That does not mean they cannot be interesting, though. With just a few changes, life on Earth could have been very different. We seem to live on a world beset with cataclysms that have wiped out whole dynasties of creatures now and again, wiping the slate clean for another type of creature to come to the fore – the classic example we all know is the destruction of the dinosaurs that made way for the age of mammals.

The ascent of the mammals was not a given. Unlike earlier presentations, we now know that dinosaurs were not sluggish and stupid creatures, but were almost certainly warm-blooded, quick, and some had brain-to-body-size ratios to match those of their mammalian contemporaries. Indeed, most researchers are of the opinion that the dinosaurs did not in fact die out and one branch of the dinosaur family made it through and lives beside us today: the birds. The rise of the mammals as the dominant land-animals seems to owe as much to luck as anything else.

Turning the clock back further, and consider that when the first lobe-finned lung-fish crawled out of a swamp and struggled its way across a spar of sand to a deeper pool, it was only fluke that it had four limbs, and not two, or six, or even five. That creature, something like tiktalic discovered on Ellesmere Island, went on to give rise to all the dynasties of land-living animals since. At that time, the Earth’s land masses were drifting together to form the super-continent Pangea. What if it had been drifting apart instead? Could different continents have given rise to different types of land-living animals before finally drifting back together?

There’s no reason for aliens to have four limbs and stand upright like us, the only reason we see them this way in movies and TV is to fit a human actor into the alien suit!

I created an alien species for an SF story when I wrote under the Livia Lynn Rose pen-name. Instead of encountering them in the flesh, human explorers discovered traces of them on a ravaged world, and a team of archaeologists were sent in to try and figure out what they had been before a cataclysm wiped them out. Some features they shared with humans, having a recognisable front and back end, eyes, mouths, and jointed limbs. But they had six limbs, not four, and the most interesting thing about them was the way they had sex.

All of the children born were male. When they reached about half of their final size, they became sexually mature as males, and functioned that way for a few years. Then they underwent a menopause as they continued to grow, before maturing as female at their full growth.

Naturally, this lead to an interesting culture. Rather than forming monogamous relationships, they instead formed broader communities. At sexual maturity males would leave their mothers to live in large “temples” that females would visit when they wished to mate. To avoid in-breeding they would be sent to temples in other communities, which would bond different communities together in a kind of “marriage” on a communal scale.

Excerpt

Once again, here’s an excerpt from that story. Hope you like it!

We reach the refectory where the smell of food cooking tickles my taste buds. Unfortunately, as we are still in free-fall, the food has to be served in cans and tubes. Thankfully, the seats have straps to hold us down, and I grab my breakfast and take a seat as other members of our expedition filter in. Looking at them, the humbleness of my roots is reinforced, because unlike them I am completely natural. Other than some necessary medical procedures to join this trip, I am as I was born from my mother’s womb. Dr. Singh is over three hundred years old, and does not look a day over twenty-five. Alison Craver sails past, graceful and perfect with golden skin and hair, sixty years old and looking a perfect eighteen. My skin has moles, freckles, blemishes. Until recently I had to exercise daily to keep my muscle tone, and watch every calorie to maintain my figure. Next to Alison Craver I am an ugly duckling. At twenty-two I am the youngest person in the room by several decades. While I’m honored to be included, I know that I am woefully overshadowed by my peers. The lights dim low and one wall lights up with color as it transforms into a visual display of stars. The rich, translucent wisps of a planetary nebula fill half of the star field with shimmering color through which more distant stars glitter. It is the tombstone of a dead star close to the star system we are currently approaching. In the center of the field of stars, just to one side of the nebula, a brighter star than all the rest glows soft yellow. It has no name, just a long catalogue number, and was considered completely unremarkable until recently. The sight is breathtakingly beautiful, and at the same time very lonely. We are a long, long way from home. “Ladies and gentlemen,” Dr. Singh’s voice carries through the room, although he is off to one side and out of my field of view. “You will be happy to know that we have arrived safely at our destination star system, with just a little distance to go. We have communicated ahead and the vanguard team has already assembled habitats for us on Gomorrah.” The image zooms in toward the central star and then to one side, where it focuses on a small, bleak ball of rock that the first prospectors named Gomorrah. It is an odd world, massing perhaps twice that of Earth, in the green zone around its primary star that is conducive to life, except the planet is almost airless – as were the other planets in the solar system. Even the large gas giants are much smaller than would have been expected, and denuded of lighter, volatile elements. Gomorrah’s thin atmosphere was like that of Mars, barely enough to lift the fine dust on the surface in periodic storms. In their explorations, they had discovered something new, something utterly remarkable. First of all, some of the surface showed signs of having been weathered by wind and water. Surface features bore resemblances to tectonic processes which no longer dominated. Then, in one area, beneath rolling sand dunes, a radar scan had shown lines and squares of a grid pattern. When they dug into the sand, they found cut stone blocks first, and then complete structures. Incredibly ancient, long buried, and undoubtedly made by entities not remotely human, they were buildings. Never before had mankind encountered advanced life, let alone another sentient, tool-using species. “The current working theory is that this entire star-system was scoured by the supernova explosion that created the Lepidus Nebula,” Dr. Singh continues. “This explosion would have blasted the Gomorrah system with gamma radiation of intensity sufficient to strip away the atmospheres of all the smaller planets, and severely deplete those of the gas giant and ice giant planets. Even the primary star will have lost a significant quantity of mass.” “Fire and brimstone from the sky,” I whisper softly. Trek glances across at me, but no one else seems to have noticed as Dr. Singh continues. “This accounts for the preservations of the ruins,” Dr. Singh explains. “Without any significant atmosphere, weathering would be vastly reduced. As volcanic activity out gassed some replacement atmosphere, the primary site was buried beneath volcanic ash and sand dunes, leaving it in near-pristine condition just few million years after the catastrophe.” “How long ago was that?” one of the other postgraduate students asks. “Approximately four hundred and fifty million years ago,” Dr. Singh replies calmly. “At that time, the most advanced creatures on earth were fish, and life had yet to venture onto land. “This is undoubtedly the oldest ruin any of us will have excavated. This is why our numbers include a number of paleontologists as well as us archaeologists,” Dr. Singh smiles. “This is the very first example of complex life evolved away from Earth that we have ever discovered, even if it is extinct and fossilized. Our expedition, my colleagues, is the most momentous one ever undertaken by any archeologist or paleontologist, ever…so, no pressure!” A ripple of nervous laughter flows through the room. Perhaps I am not so alone in feeling overwhelmed by these events now. We are a group of a hundred and twenty archeologists and paleontologists, as well as other disciplines from physics to philology, and we are only the first of many. *** On every side of me I was being caressed, stroked, and aroused. The strange, pale figures with their pale skin, long limbs and dark eyes seemed sensual and indefinably erotic as my body arched in pleasure. There is no fear, only delight as my sex became wetter and wetter. The leader of them moves me easily, and his dual phallus parted my pussy-lips and nuzzled at my ass, and despite my innocence I yielded to my instincts with a low moan and pushed back. With a cry of delight I was slowly entered and filled to perfection… I blink awake, hot and flustered from my erotic dream. If there had been anyone there they would have seen me blushing furiously at my sinful fantasy. Thankfully, the Gomorrah biomes were large and spacious enough that we had rooms to ourselves, small though they were. The huge transparent domes had been built by the advance members of the expedition at the edge of the dune field beneath which we dug for our ruins. They contained laboratories, a hospital, apartments, even parks and hydroponic farms.

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