To our good friends on Marble-2
Madhava B.
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My piece is a meaningful first-contact message from aliens, with a comedic twist. Throughout this semester, I’d been experimenting with thoughtful and dramatic ideas, but had never quite got the hang of it. On this story, which I had written for the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, I decided to take a slightly different approach. Inspired by Exurb1a (an existential-y youtube channel), a lot of previous sci-fi reading, and a rapidly approaching deadline, I wanted to write a short story about a first contact message, but with a twist. I got to thinking: who would actually write these messages? On our planet, I believe we had a few government funded messages that are still making their way to far off planets, but what about a message from an alien planet? From there stemmed the idea that maybe it wasn’t a representative entity sending the message, but instead a bunch of mischievous kids. In the end, I think my piece incorporates current ideas about life in the stars (such as the Great Filter), a good helping of meaningful-sounding phrases (many of which lack substance, which is on purpose) and an unexpected twist to make the story interesting enough to justify the more serious prelude.
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The ability to synthesize accumulated ideas into an idea that is somewhat more than its components, more new and different.
