Caz

And yet, I’ll try.

A couple of years back, I wrote a tongue-in-cheek horror story (ALL my horror is tongue-in-cheek) in which the villain was building computers by harvesting human brains. I sent it through the workshop I attended at the time, where it met with various reactions. But one lady, Flonet Biltgen, pointed-out that the whole brain-harvesting thing didn’t have to be nearly so horrible. You could just collect the brains from people who died of other causes, like we do with other organs. And thus, that aspect of the story was completely deflated. (I figured out how to re-inflate it later, but that’s beside the point.)

Well, same goes here. Why does the alien need to KILL somebody? Why not go with somebody who has had their body donated to science? In fact, wouldn’t the logical choice be to select somebody who’s life was nearing or had reached its natural conclusion anyway, who had seen more of what the human experience had to offer?

Somebody like … my friend Flonet. She was a wife, a mother, a grandmother, a writer, an athelete, a sailor, a ham radio operator, a biker babe, and probably many other things of which I’m wholly unaware. She lived a life ordinarily seen only in the more hyperactive kind of sci-fi protagonist.

Lived.

She died of cancer last month.

And, frankly, I think she would have been honored to have her last act on this planet be to get it invited into interstellar society.

Like I said, a whole lotta irony going on.

Somehow, I suspect my reaction was unique.

Actually, when I was reading Snow Crash, I didn’t notice that it was in the present tense.