Commentary on First Contact 09-30-2024
Read the piece here.
This originally started as a dream. I had a dream that I was being eaten by an alien. From that dream, there are only a few things that I could remember: its teeth, the care with which it bit into me, and the certainty that this was an act of love.
Now, devoid of that dream environment, this was almost certainly a gruesome, violent act. It could only be painless in that dream state. But after I woke up, I knew I had to write about it, to try and get that feeling of consumption being an act of love. As I started considering the story, there had to be a reason for why this act happened, and so the concept of the Kephantes was born.
Now, the other inspiration you may notice stems from the Alien franchise. It's both inspired the piece (and the dream) as I watched Alien: Romulus recently. The concepts of using humans as hosts, how the alien eats its "mother" not out of any malice, but rather that's all it knows at that age - those thoughts were likely behind why I had that dream. In any case, it went from one type of horror to potentially another type of horror.
Honestly, I don't know how this turned out. I tried to convey a feeling, a dream, and ended up writing a brief history of alien relations. It's almost certainly a self insert, I mean, it's the dream I had after all. But I think it paints a different view to the one that the Alien franchise shows, and that's good enough for me.