Foreword
For writers of science fiction, the Fermi Paradox is the one question we can’t stop asking. Our galaxy is immense, filled with billions of stars, potentially millions of planets where life may have developed. Life that might have evolved sentience, curiosity, the desire to communicate with other beings. After all, that’s our story. It should have happened over and over again in the fourteen billion years since the Big Bang. So where are the aliens? Why, when we look outward, do we hear only silence? Why do we detect only dead worlds? Worse that dead worlds, actually, because dead suggests something lived there, once. We look out at the sky and we see: sterility. Worlds where life never had a chance. Choking skies. Dry deserts so cold they would freeze your bones. Unsolid worlds made of superhot poison gas.
Where are the others like us?
Why aren’t they talking?
There are many suggested solutions to the Paradox. A lot of the stories in this volume wrestle with one possible answer or another, answers that resound in the imagination like the faces of evil gods: the Dark Forest, the Great Filter, the horrible secrets of Deep Time.
But all those answers are optimistic, compared to the possibility that keeps me awake at night, the one I call the Non-Zero Chance. They all assume that there are aliens out there, aliens we might one day communicate with, even if that’s a bad idea. Even if that would mean the end of us.
The Non-Zero Chance is, to me, worse.
Given the enormous size of our galaxy, given the potential number of habitable worlds, it is nearly impossible, extraordinarily unlikely that, given enough chemicals and enough time, life would have emerged on just one single planet out of countless worlds.
Extraordinarily unlikely. Nearly impossible. But the equation doesn’t actually rule out the negative result. Imagine it:
We are alone.
Of all the planets whirling through the great galactic gyre, all the bits of rock and dust in an unfathomably big volume of space, life, you and me and everyone we know, every animal you’ve ever seen in a petting zoo, all the tiny little transparent bits of goo writhing on your face right now, all that bio-diverse panoply only happened once. Right here. Four billion years ago a stray cosmic ray hit a phosphorous molecule in a way it shouldn’t have, by complete accident, and it never happened again. Nowhere else.
We are alone.
Let this one sink in. The thing about horror is that it requires an open mind. Horror is the penalty—or, for some us, the reward—for chasing a thought too far. So if you want a good chill, really sit down and think about what the Non-Zero Chance means.
The galaxy, and all the galaxies beyond, reaching out into infinity, are empty. All of those planets are silent under empty skies. Out of all those craters dotting alien landscapes, not a single one has footprints crossing its dusty floor. No eye has ever opened blearily at the bottom of an icy sea and looked up to see the light of a red star. The voiceless winds blowing through all those alien canyons can’t even be called haunted, can’t be called spooky, because without life there are no ghosts.
Life only happened here. Nowhere else.
And life, as we know all too well, is finite.
Humanity won’t last forever. The Earth only has a few billion years left, and the chance that we will find a way to colonize other stars before then is starting to seem like a longshot. There will come a time when the last organism on this planet draws its last breath and then…
In every direction, there will be nothing alive. Nothing moving under its own volition. The universe will once again be unseen. Unknown. Unremembered. Unmourned.
Scary enough to contemplate, but now, the kicker: there is a non-zero chance that what I just described is an accurate picture of the cosmos.
Just keep telling yourself it’s extraordinarily unlikely.
★
Of course even if we were alone, we would still want to tell each other stories about bug-eyed monsters and little green men. Science fiction does not often trouble itself with empty skies. Thus the variety of tales in the present volume. There are aliens in this book—a lot of them! Rachel Searcey’s “The Trocophore” gives us a new take on that most beloved classic, the tentacled murderbeast. Bridget D. Brave’s “Last Transmission from the FedComm Sargasso” gives us something far weirder but very much alive, breathing and waiting just beyond the corner of your eye. The monster at the heart of David Worn’s “The Vela Remnant” is… no. You know what? I’m not going to spoil that one, not one bit. Go read it for yourself. You won’t regret it.
Other stories in this collection look at the Fermi Paradox from the opposite end of the telescope. What will it take for us to explore the galaxy, to find others like us? Some of them examine the interface between human life and the technology we will need to reach other stars. “Son of Demeter,” Bryan Young’s take on the generation ship, is downright horrifying in its implications. “Red Rovers”, Patrick Barb’s contribution, turns some of the cutest machines we’ve ever built into terrifying monsters.
My non-zero chance scares me, but it’s not the only possibility that does. Which is a good thing for us writers. A future with people in it, aliens and humans distorted by technology beyond comprehension, just makes for better stories. Before you lies a wonderful assortment of futures that explore their own non-zero chances. Because if there is a question more deeply rooted in the genre than the Fermi Paradox, it is the much simpler, but even more evocative: What if…?
It is the duty of a writer to ask questions. To go there. To look at all the myriad possibilities that exist and not to flinch away from what you find. Like the scientists whose ideas we borrow, we would rather have answers than ignorance.
Even if the things we discover are uncomfortable. Dangerous. Terrifying. Because there is some part of us that loves the tingling dread, the way the hair stands up on the back of our necks when we realize the universe is bigger—and darker—than previously suspected. That’s what this book is for, that deliciously awful feeling.
P.L. McMillan has put together a great assortment of frights for you. I hope you will enjoy the stories here collected, just as I have. And I hope, for your sake, for all of our sakes, that we are not alone.
But you never know.
—David Wellington, author of The Last Astronaut and Paradise-1
New York City, 2023