I've always been in the camp of "reality IS stranger than fiction". As in, the world and the universe are so absolutely immense and incomprehensible with our ape brains that it's just a given that we are going to uncover and discover things that are weirder than anything ever written about before. The incredible thing about this, is that it all makes excellent fodder for new avenues of fiction.
ie: the very real space programs based on real science about moving humans up off of the surface of our planet spurred pretty much every space opera ever as writers scrambled to speculate wildly about what COULD be, when presented with a nascent fact or theory in its infancy.
For me, the prospect of life on other planets feels like an obvious fact, given the size of the universe and the sheer amount of stuff in it. how close that and accessible that life is to earth though, as well as its form, seems to be the real salient question.
Someone else mentioned that if my hypothetical did come to pass (disclosure, no other changes) then the sales for steamy alien romances would go way up...
Move over, cyberpunk. Time to work on that romance writing style.
I've always been in the camp of "reality IS stranger than fiction". As in, the world and the universe are so absolutely immense and incomprehensible with our ape brains that it's just a given that we are going to uncover and discover things that are weirder than anything ever written about before. The incredible thing about this, is that it all makes excellent fodder for new avenues of fiction.
ie: the very real space programs based on real science about moving humans up off of the surface of our planet spurred pretty much every space opera ever as writers scrambled to speculate wildly about what COULD be, when presented with a nascent fact or theory in its infancy.
For me, the prospect of life on other planets feels like an obvious fact, given the size of the universe and the sheer amount of stuff in it. how close that and accessible that life is to earth though, as well as its form, seems to be the real salient question.
Someone else mentioned that if my hypothetical did come to pass (disclosure, no other changes) then the sales for steamy alien romances would go way up...
Move over, cyberpunk. Time to work on that romance writing style.