THE TOMORROW WAR: ALIENS IN OUR FUTURE

The Fourth of July here in the U.S. marked the official kickoff of summer movie blockbuster season. And whether they’re brave enough to visit your local multiplex, or still watching at home, there’s plenty to keep science fiction fans occupied.

Like a battle with aliens in the future in THE TOMORROW WAR, now showing on Amazon Prime Video. This SF monster mashup is steered by LEGO movie franchise director Chris McKay, written by DEADFALL’s Zach Dean, and stars Chris Pratt, veteran actor J. K. Simmons, Yvonne Strahovski (Handmaid’s Tale), and a host of talented Black actors who miraculously do not die in the first thirty minutes! THE TOMORROW WAR, an alien-blasting actioner with a surprising amount of heart, was originally filmed for the big screen by Paramount and Skydance Films, but its release was delayed due to COVID, and the film was sold to Amazon for $200 million for a small-screen debut this past weekend.

This film is fun in a lot of ways, but I have to start by saying its founding premise has holes big enough to fly a spaceship through. Few SF writers or filmmakers get time travel right, and this one is no exception. Here we are expected to believe that 30 years in the future, bloodthirsty aliens have invaded the Earth and humanity is losing a war with them, to the extent that only 500,000 humans remain to fight the good fight. Our descendants discover a way (don’t ask for details) to go back in time to the present to recruit some of our billions of inhabitants to fight for them/us.

At first, they just take military troops, but even all the world’s armies aren’t equal to the challenge. So, a worldwide draft is instituted to feed the war machine fighting the aliens. The term of service is a short seven days, but only 30 percent of those drafted come back, and those that do suffer from severe physical, mental, and emotional trauma.

The military gives their new recruits no training, not even a helmet or boots. Just sends them through a wormhole to the future to be “White Spike” (alien) fodder. There are other details about the time travel, but, as Jim Kirk always said, they’d only give you a headache. It’s only when you just forget trying to impose any kind of logic on the time travel aspects of this film and instead take it as a straight-up humans vs. aliens shoot-em-up, that THE TOMORROW WAR starts to rise above its B-movie status.

Chris Pratt, often the Everyman hero in these kinds of films, plays Dan Forester, an Army Special Ops veteran hoping for a career in chemical engineering but reduced to teaching high school chemistry to support his wife and young science-crazy daughter Muri. Dan is—inevitably—drafted to fight the aliens. He briefly considers dodging the draft, an act which would require his estranged father’s help to remove the tracking device attached to his arm. He hasn’t spoken to the old man (played with gritty gusto by J.K. Simmons) for years, blaming him for abandoning the family when Dan was a child. The elder Forester tries to explain he left due to the symptoms of his PTSD from Vietnam, but Dan will have none of it (or of the old man’s attempts to make amends and get to know his granddaughter). In the end, Dan resigns himself to his service, refusing at first to take any help from the man someone later calls “conspiracy Santa” because of his beard and off-the-grid wackiness.

Chris Pratt leads his team against the aliens.

The fight between father and son, and the emotional costs of battle that can extend across generations, is an unexpected theme running through THE TOMORROW WAR. When heroes are busy killing bad guys, no one thinks about the toll it takes on them once the fighting is over. Yes, we have serious movies that address the issue (THE DEER HUNTER, ZERO DARK THIRTY), but it’s a rare thing to see a blockbuster film aimed at a mass audience devote screen time to the consequences of what we are all asking the heroes to do—that is, go out there and face the uber-violent monsters.

At one point, the heroine, Colonel Muri Forester (yes, that Muri Forester, as an adult, played by Polish-Australian actor Yvonne Strahovski) explains the aliens’ motivations: “They have no use for prisoners or government, technology, money... nothing. We are food. And they are hungry.” So you can imagine what it must be like to fight them and what kind of scars that leaves.

And, it turns out, [spoiler alert] when Dan meets his grown daughter in the future, now the kickass commander of the anti-alien fighting forces, she is aloof and cold. Eventually the truth comes out—when he’d returned from his draft service, he’d been unable to readjust to civilian life. He’d abandoned his family just as his own father had—and for the same reasons. Yikes!

That’s the most surprising element of the plot, though not by any means the only one. Of course, we have the usual “assembling of the team” aspect that is common to any action film. But in this case, the team includes a higher than usual percentage of Black, female, and older members.  Edwin Hodge and Sam Richardson stand out, as does Alexis Louder and Mary Lynn Rajskub (of 24). All these actors last longer than you might expect, as does big-bodied actor Mike Mitchell, and all are given worthy deaths when the time comes.

In the opposite corner we have the aliens, called White Spikes due to their nasty habit of shooting bone darts at their human opponents (not to mention their ripping teeth and their tentacles and their ungodly speed and their swarming numbers!). Not only are these some creatively creepy ETs, they’re some sneaky ones, too. In one of the film’s best twists [more spoilers], they didn’t just arrive in a fleet of spaceships one day and land on the D.C. Mall. They crash-landed into a glacier in Russia circa 1000 A.D. as cargo on a ship hauled by some other species a la ALIEN. Were they meant to be a planet-clearing weapon? Prisoners? We’ll never know, because the pilot of the spaceship died and, of course, no one is looking for a ship’s log.

Global warming eventually thaws the White Spikes out of their icy crypt, allowing them to spread undetected until it’s too late to stop them. They overrun the Earth, destroying humans, livestock, wildlife, and the lot, until, desperate, the last of humanity calls on the past for help.

I won’t tell you how the heroes come up with a plan to save the world. But I will tell you that the last 30 to 45 minutes of the film are exciting, ridiculous, glorious fun. And the solution won’t make your head hurt!  Yay!

Not only that, but the emotional ending of the film for Dan and his family is just as satisfying. Yay, again!

Yes, THE TOMORROW WAR may be too long and derivative and full of plot holes and we probably won’t remember it as a classic of the genre. But the aliens are memorable, the human characters are diverse and substantive, and the subplots are twisty and surprising. Do we really need more in our summer blockbusters? I think not. Spend some time with your popcorn and a beverage in front of this one. You won’t regret it.

Cheers, Donna

ALIEN FOCUS SHIFTS IN KING OF PAIN

One of the first things you learn as a science fiction romance writer is how to populate your worlds with alien beings. You make your choices—will your aliens be humanoid or so different from us they are nearly unrecognizable? Will they be carbon-based, or based on some other element common throughout the galaxy? Do they breathe oxygen/nitrogen or some other mix? And are you a tentacle-love kinda gal, or, um, not, and will you carry your readers along with you?

The Grays--of froggy origin.

My decisions led me in the direction of mostly humanoid, carbon-based and air-breathing, only because those characteristics made it so much easier to justify my basic premise: that a species of aliens was stealing humans from Earth to serve as slave labor in their galactic empire. The slave-trading aliens—the Minertsans, or Grays—are themselves cold-blooded and amphibian in basic biology, having evolved in a swampy environment from frog-like creatures. But they share enough of the same characteristics of humans that both species could exist on the same planets.

That’s also true of the other humanoid alien species in my Interstellar Rescue series: the tall, lantern-jawed Ninoctins; the brutish, flat-nosed Barelians; the aggressive, telepathic Thranes. Even the non-sentient creatures I’ve created for the series—the buffalo-like psoros, native to Thrane but now commonly raised as a meat animal on several planets; or the targa, a wildcat with a poisonous bite, from a system in the Outer Reaches; or Minertsa’s fang eel—would be able to survive, though possibly not thrive, if transplanted to Earth.  

These parameters circumscribe my science fiction universe a bit, I’ll admit. I ruled out tentacle love a long time ago. And a “monster of the week” for my starship captain wasn’t in the mix, either. I’m more interested in the human—or humanoid—interaction. And I’m plenty challenged trying to come up with wild new ideas within the boundaries I’ve imposed on myself.

Take my latest work-in-progress, for example. In King of Pain: Interstellar Rescue Series Book 5, I’ve had to describe the homeworld of the alien Thrane people in detail as the primary setting of the book. This is the story of Trevyn Dar, a Thrane and half-brother to Gabriel Cruz, hero of Trouble in Mind: Interstellar Rescue Series Book 2. In his first appearance, Trevyn is a “good bad guy,” doing his best to mitigate the damage done by his older brother Kinnian while still under his thumb. He moves toward the light at the end of Trouble in Mind and makes even more progress toward becoming the man he wants to be in Not Fade Away: Interstellar Rescue Series Book 4. But he still carries the guilt of his time as Kinnian’s lieutenant and the son of the Thrane known galaxy-wide as “The Butcher of Four Systems.”

Trevyn’s chance at redemption finally comes when he is called upon to rescue a woman imprisoned on Thrane due to his mistake and slated for execution as a terrorist. Lael Saphora is Hinarr,  a genetically separate species that Thranes disparage as “Ghosts”—because they lack the psy talents that distinguish the majority species of that planet. Yet the Hinarr have their own unique ability: they are shapeshifters, sharing DNA and physical bodies with the snowcats of the rugged mountain ranges of Thrane.

 

The snowcats of Thrane are similar to Earth's own snow leopards.

For hundreds of circuits the dominant Thranes have considered the Hinarr little more than animals, hunting them in their snowcat form and exploiting them as unskilled labor in their humanoid form. But things are about to change. The Hinarr are rising up. Trevyn and Lael, on the run from enemies both political and personal, first forge an alliance of convenience. But they soon find a love stronger than any history, culture, pride or family tie is binding them inevitably to each other. 

The challenge I’m facing now is in creating a new alien species that incorporates elements common to paranormal romance—the shapeshifter. I’ve read plenty of PNR, but I have to admit, I wasn’t paying attention to some of the details. Like, what happens to the clothes when a shifter shifts? It’s fine if the climate is warm (like in Christine Feehan’s Leopard series, which is set in the tropics), or if you just say up front that your characters don’t mind the cold (like Nalini Singh mostly does in her Psy-Changling series). But Thrane is cold, especially in the snowy mountains. Naked humanoids would need protection. 

And then there’s the problem of modesty between newly introduced main characters. She shifts and leaves her clothes behind; he sees her naked wa-a-a-y too early. And in one scene, they’re in the process of escaping a prison. I currently having him scooping up her clothes for her when she changes, but it’s awkward, you know? 



I’m also still working out exactly how she shifts—in a flash? Slowly, cell by cell? Or is it like one of those 80s werewolf movies where she sprouts fur and ears and the snout elongates—no, that’s definitely not romantic!  


And, of course, there’s the ultimate question of how the Hinarr evolved to embody two such different types of physical beings in a single, uh, package. Somehow, it’s easier to imagine—and explain within some realm of scientific possibility—the existence of aliens in our vast galaxy. Even aliens that share much with humans, or that have evolved under similar circumstances. But shapeshifters have usually come under the purview of the paranormal, that is, those things unexplainable by science. So, what’s a science fiction romance author to do?


I have a theory, which I’m not quite ready to reveal yet. It probably wouldn’t satisfy our pickier brothers over at the hard SF end of the spectrum, but they aren’t my biggest fans, anyway. Too much kissy-face in my books for them! I figure if I can provide a reasonable explanation that doesn’t rely on magic or shatter the laws of biology beyond all repair, my readers will accept it. 

As long as the story keeps them turning pages. That’s always the first priority, anyway, right?

IN HONOR OF

Katherine Johnson in 2005

Mathematician, space scientist, human computer and NASA pioneer Katherine Johnson, who died February 24 at the age of 101. If not for Ms. Johnson and her fellow "computers"--most of them black and all of them women--at NASA in the late 50s and early 60s, the U.S. space program would never have gotten off the ground. We certainly would never have made it to the moon in a time without the vast calculating power of cyber-machines. Ms. Johnson and her colleagues did all the calculating with a sliderule and their considerable intellect, despite overt prejudice and the bullying that came with it. We all owe her a massive debt.

Cheers, Donna

OFF TO S.P.A.C.E.!

I REALLY hope not like this!

No time to blog this week--I'm in the metropolis of Spruce Pine, North Carolina for the first annual Spruce Pine Alien Conference and EXPO! I'll be speaking on the Alien Nation panel with Mike Bara of Ancient Aliens fame, and selling and signing books in the vendors' area. Wish me luck, y'all, and hope I don't get Taken in the process! Follow all the fun on Facebook!

Cheers, Donna

MY FIRST TRIP TO S.P.A.C.E.!

The Brown Mountain Lights shine on.

In a remote area of western North Carolina stands Brown Mountain, site of the Brown Mountain Lights. These mysterious glowing blue-white lights, first seen hovering or speeding over the hulking mountain by the Cherokee in times past, have contributed to North Carolina’s reputation as a target of UFO investigation for decades.

So it’s only fitting that now, just over the ridge from Brown Mountain in neighboring Mitchell County NC, the first annual Spruce Pine Alien Conference and EXPO  (S.P.A.C.E.) is planned for June 14 and 15. The two-day fun-filled event schedule features an alien costume contest, panel discussions, night-time “dark sky” tours, decorated bike and river raft races, live music, dozens of vendors, a beer garden, a stage for folks to share their “alien encounter” stories and appearances by Mike Bara of the History Channel’s Ancient Aliens series. I’m an SF con veteran and I’m way excited by this line-up!

Of course, I may be too busy to enjoy much of S.P.A.C.E.’s offerings. I’ll be signing books at my own vendor booth on the main drag (the town has closed Locust Avenue to vehicular traffic for the event). I’ll also be one of several “experts” on a speakers’ panel discussing “Aliens Among Us.” Squeee! 

Spruce Pine Reimagined for S.P.A.C.E.

And, dear readers, the organizers are expecting 10,000 visitors for this thing! If they get even half that number, it will be more than twice the crowd that usually attends Shore Leave or RWA Nationals. Wowzer!

The little town of Spruce Pine, population 2175 at the last census, is probably not prepared for this influx, but no one can fault the conference organizers for their initiative in finding a way to capitalize on the local UFO connection. The outer space tie-in includes not just Brown Mountain. Mitchell County provides most of the quartz used in telescopes and microchips in the U.S. The International Dark-Sky Association (IDA) designated the Mayland Earth to Sky Park and Observatory outside Spruce Pine as the first IDA-certified Star Park in the southeastern United States. 

With all this excitement it’s hard to know how to prepare for S.P.A.C.E. Our own town of Marshall has grown the June 8 Mermaid Parade and Festival from a wildly creative, but small, gathering of sea princesses and pirates to a day-long extravaganza of seafood contests, splash-y fun, arts and crafts, and live music, as well as the climactic parade in just four short years. Folks come from the big city of Asheville and surrounding counties to spend the day (and their tourist dollars), turning our sleepy little town into a celebratory crazy place.

A festival dedicated to aliens has the potential to bring in folks from all over the country—if the organizers have done their promo jobs right. That’s a little scary for me, much less for the residents of Spruce Pine. But it can also be a heckuva lot of fun. I’m really looking forward to my first trip to S.P.A.C.E. Wish me bon voyage!

Cheers, Donna