What goes up, stays up: The story of ALIEN EXIT.

Geoff Nelder is one of my favourite writers. He has a superb way of looking at odd storylines and giving them a twist. Geoff decided to self-publish ‘Alien Exit’, and discusses here its development from a previous novel ‘Exit, Pursued by a Bee’.

At least in ALIEN EXIT where alien spheres that had been buried in the Earth’s crust for millennia chose a day when they had to leave. Not only to rise upwards, taking whatever was above them, but slowly at about a foot an hour. Just imagine if there was one of these spheres underneath Glastonbury Tor, then during the festival the bricks of the ruined church crumbled and fell as the top of the hill rose up into the air. Police called in engineers who couldn’t make a dent in the silvery orb. All they could do was to watch it slowly lift. Eventually, into orbit it meets up with other spheres.

Oh well, so alien spheres leave the Earth, no harm done? Wait. Earthquakes tumbled cities and fissures threw seas and land into chaos, initially along the lines of tectonic plates then as if in random places all over the planet. Scientists soon realised that they were time quakes.

Us humans are used to experiencing time as a linear, untroubled happening like a film. Suppose the smooth passing of time on Earth is chaotic in the rest of the Universe. Perhaps Earth time is kept continuous by buried alien spheres absorbing time decoherences. What happens when the spheres leave? The Earth orbits the sun at 18 miles per second. If the mountain in front of you is thrown back a second, it slips 18 miles.

Imagine such time-quakes happening all over the world.

Kallandra is the feisty woman pilot on a Mars mission, which is diverted to chase the departing alien spheres. Arguing against hawkish military generals on Earth, who want to nuke the spheres, Kallandra finds that radio transmissions are ignored by the aliens. Eventually she discovers a means to talk to the Spheres. But will they listen and return to Earth?

Note the photograph is of the author when he used a model Earth to help calculate equidistant points for the sphere’s emergence.

Critical ideas used in Alien Exit:

Instead of shooting up at 7 miles per second, the spheres leave at a sedately one foot per hour.

A completely new form of communication in space was invented for this story.

Game Theory and quantum mechanics are used in this story but in a completely understandable way.

This is a first contact story but where the aliens have been here many millennia before humans were around.

Unlike the older science fiction this story revolves around people’s emotions and urges. (sex in space, but not as you know it.)

Buy Links:

ALIEN EXIT: Available as a Kindle ebook for less than a coffee and cake from this universal Amazon link: