"Ultimately in this book I am concerned with the question: Is it wise to try and communicate with technologically advanced extraterrestrial civilisations?". Duncan Fraser
An odd little incident many years ago provided both my motivation and the germ of the story.
I lived in hostels when I was 18. One of my roommates saw a science fiction short story competition advertised in a newspaper. He cut out the entry form and presented it to me saying that I should write a story and send it in. This took me by complete surprise because I had never expressed any interest in science fiction or in writing. He seemed to have an inexplicable confidence that I could do it. I thought it strange for him to think of me like that because at the time I would never have passed for an artist or an intellectual or even as someone vaguely intelligent.
A few years later I did have an intellectual awakening and I did start writing but I wasn’t interested in science fiction. However, as the decades passed, I remembered the incident and felt a nagging compulsion to accept what I began to think of as my inescapable fate. And so, about forty years later, I started to contemplate writing a science fiction story.
I have been fascinated by the idea of extraterrestrial civilisations for a long time. In recent years, as I would be standing at a bus stop on my way home from work on wintry evenings, my attention would focus on a particular star in my line of sight. I would begin to daydream about an alien civilisation around that star. It would be at about the same stage of technological development as ourselves, maybe slightly ahead. And rather than weaving a story about its leaders or warriors or astronauts, I imagined what the lives of its ordinary workers might be like. Perhaps workers living in a hostel. A hostel in space. A hostel in a city in space. I later discovered that the star I was focussing on at the bus stop was called Zeta Herculis.
Intelligent alien life forms will almost certainly be so dissimilar to us that mutual understanding might be very difficult. In the story that was forming in my mind, I came up with a solution to this problem by introducing the device of an artificially intelligent technology that translates the utterly alien communication into a comprehensible message in our own idiomatic language and with every detail of the alien world given a recognisable correlate in ours.
Dollop, a homesick young man, keeps a diary of his life in The Terrarium, a vast space city, as part of a groundbreaking extraterrestrial project. Living in a hostel with two peers, Backlog and Methane, and the enigmatic older man Octave, he feels uncertain about his future and lacks ambition. But after slowly building up his confidence, a shocking truth emerges that compels Dollop to reassess his identity.
TERRARIUM HOSTEL is available on back order in paperback £9.50
DUNCAN FRASER is an award-winning Scottish writer and poet and the author of the sonnet cycle The Campus of Love (Matador, 2018).
