It's the Alien Devil!
New Comics, Paradox, and Disclosure Day
I’m super excited that Shots Fired, my gritty cop fighting to survive in a small-town America ravaged by the meth epidemic, which first came out in issues of the Pilot Studio’s anthology, Lady Fight, is being collected along with all of the great stories from those books.
Here is the trade paperback cover with art by Mike Dreher, with Seb Valencia on colors. Pilot Studios will be having a Kickstarter for this amazing book soon. I’ll let you all know when to sign up for alerts!
Speaking of fun comics from me and the amazing people I am honored to work with, Son Chasers is now in stores everywhere from Red Five Comics! Pick it up for an action-packed adventure!
I also have a few copies as well. Drop me a comment or a message if you're interested in picking up a copy.
As someone who reads everything that Douglas Preston puts out, I was there day one for Paradox.
Extinction, the first book in this series, was a lot of fun and had a great focus on cloning extinct animals and what it could be capable of. This one is written with his daughter. However they balanced the workload, the quality was excellent.
On the surface, the Paradox storyline follows a basic police/thriller structure: people are being killed for what they know, and we follow the main characters as they figure out who is doing the killing and why. It is the why that had me so intrigued. To write about that, I am going to get into a little bit of spoiler territory, though it does state some of this on the book cover as well.
The plot of Paradox is timely. I fell down the rabbit hole when Evangelical pastor Perry Stone claimed last month that the government had met with Christian pastors and told them to prepare their congregations for the fact that aliens are real!
Of course, it was all shut down pretty quickly, and who knows what was really said or if it even happened. But the thought problem is pretty interesting. Would proof that aliens were out there and an advanced civilization had visited Earth move people away from their religious faith?
I tend to say no.
Most Christians I know have little understanding of the Bible and rarely read it (I’m not talking about you specifically, good reader). Their belief is in tradition and dogma. So, they would just fold aliens into their ideas or, like some pastors argued when the story broke, see the aliens as demons trying to lead them astray in the “end times.”
The latter would be the most horrible, the idea that if we are visited by altruistic aliens in the future, Christians would be blowing up their ships and seeing themselves as caught up in an Armageddon that took a real left turn from the basic American narrative that told them they would be raptured (there is a story there somewhere).
I digress a bit, back to the novel. Preston novels always have strong dialogue and great characters. This one is no exception. I enjoyed it throughout. The main characters make a very different decision than I would at the end. One that I almost find ethically problematic. Yet, I love work that makes me think and makes me want to dig in more.
The afterward of the novel has some great focus on the authors’ research. I was hoping to find it and link out to it here, but sadly, I could not.
Which brings me to Steven Spielberg’s new movie, Disclosure Day. On the way to the theater, my 13-year-old son and I had a great discussion about the question that Paradox and this movie ask: “If you knew about aliens, would you tell the world or keep it to yourself?”
It was one of the moments where I was proud to see my son thinking through the question with a critical lens and asking some great questions of his own.
Again, some minor spoilers here (for the book more than the movie). We both agreed to disclose. Where I believe that the world needs something to help people re-evaluate tradition and dogma (at the very least to study what they believe), he thought the world needed something to break it out of the cycle of hate that he sees around him. The “us vs them hatred,” as he called it. He, of course, was talking about tribalism and bigotry without fully having the words to articulate it.
I loved Disclosure Day. It was a great mix of chase movie and poignant message. Minds were changed, and it did an effective job of showing the need for empathy that we really need in the world.
Of course, when I came home and popped on to see what social media was saying about the film, I was greeted with posts such as this one.
Oh, to feel that everything you see is against you because there is diversity amongst news anchors and scientists. Maybe once we have some demons aliens to hate, people will see each other as human and stop worrying about a tiny bit of diversity in an overwhelmingly white cast.
On our way home from the movie, we talked about my son’s answer to the question. He did not care as much about whether aliens would challenge people's beliefs. He cared about whether they would challenge how people treated each other.
My son thinks aliens might break us out of our cycle of hatred. I hope he is right. But I also hope we do not need visitors from another world to remind us that the people already here are worth understanding.
Until next time, remember, the Devil we fear is rarely as interesting as the one we create.
- B