What if…
… aliens don’t look like cats, or reptiles, or insects, or anything we would recognise? Why should they? There’s no reason why they would even be based on DNA. Aliens, should we ever meet them, will just look… alien.
… humans and aliens can never communicate? Our brains will just be too different. So will our ways of perceiving the world. We can’t even communicate with whales, elephants or apes, so what chance would we have with something that “sees” using radio waves and “speaks” using pheromones? There’s no such thing as a Universal Translator, and there never will be. Not ever.
… movement between worlds isn’t done in spaceships, with crews and captains and decks and hulls? These are naval metaphors – comforting, but old-fashioned. When humanity finally travels into space we’ll use different metaphors, or invent new words to cover new situations.
Netherspace is our attempt to remove as many of the clichéd tropes of science fiction as we can, to start afresh and see what we end up with. It’s also a hugely entertaining story with lots of action and some
metaphysical speculation. So, something for everyone then…