Welcome to Guy’s Writing World
Where Writing, Faith, and Speculative Fiction Interact
Meet Guy Stewart
Guy Stewart is a husband; father, father-in-law, grandfather, and recently retired teacher, and school counselor who maintains POSSIBLY IRRITATING ESSAYS offering his writing up for comment. His first novel for YA/MS, EMERALD OF EARTH came out in 2024! He also writes on other worlds that have touched his life: GUYS GOTTA TALK ABOUT DIABETES, ALZHEIMERS; BREAST CANCER! He has 70+ publications in Analog, Cast of Wonders, Shoreline of Infinity, Cricket, Stupefying Stories, Nanoism, an essay in The Writer, and created experiments for episodes of the PBS science shows Newton’s Apple, and The New Explorers—for which he became the Science Museum of Minnesota’s Teacher of the Year.
Latest blog posts
- CREATING ALIEN ALIENS: PART 1
For the past thirty years, I taught a class for gifted and talented children in a suburb of Minneapolis where I taught middle school and high science science from, I like to point out, from Astronomy to Zoology. The class that came out of all that teaching stuff I named ALIEN WORLDS. In it, I coached my young people (from 4th through 10th grade) to build alien worlds, lifeforms, cultures, and civilizations that HAD to be logical and couldn’t riff off of ANY published, filmed, or broadcast aliens created by “the media”. The results from THIS vantage point have been astonishing and encouraging. I’ll spend time NOT narrating what I DID, but what I tossed to the kids as inspiration for them to use when creating.
My ONLY stipulation to them was this: “NO laser death of bone disintegration and flesh liquefying destructo beam blaster gun light saber of dooms…No. Not even ONE!”
With that caveat, let’s go…
I have created three universes.
In the first, it’s Humans alone. We genetically engineer ourselves to fit the varied environments we encounter. The overarching conflict is between the Empire of Man and the Confluence of Humanity. The first considers someone Human if they are 65% or more “Original Human” DNA. If you’re less, you’re considered SubHuman. The second sees ANY genetic manipulation to be A-OK.
In the second, it’s us and mobile plants. Humans have gone deep into space and encountered the WheetAh, mobile plants reminiscent of a giant saguaro cactus crossed with a pitcher plant. The conflict is as obvious as it is inevitable – we eat plants. They eat rodents; hence the pejoratives each lays on the other. We call them Weeds; they call us Weasels.
In the third, we are junior members of the Unity of Sapients, some fifty extremely different intelligences (I can’t say species – as in Kingdom Phylum Class Order Family Genus Species – as there are smart minerals, arthropods, collective, herd, and individual intelligences in the Unity. We haven’t even been certified sapient. (definition: adjective – having or showing great wisdom or sound judgment; Orig –1425–75; late Middle English sapyent < Latin sapient- (stem of sapiēns, present participle of sapere to be wise, literally: to taste, have taste), equivalent to sapi- verb stem + -ent- -ent
So, I’ve written stories in all three universes. How many in each have been published?
Confluence/Empire: I’ve written seven; only one has been published.
WheetAh: Written two; one published.
Unity: Written seventeen, four published…which seems good, until I point out that the four published stories didn’t contain aliens.So, I CAN’T write believable aliens.
Why not?
Writers who have written believable aliens: David Brin, Julie Czerneda, Hal Clement, James White, Alan Dean Foster, CJ Cherryh, Larry Niven, Octavia Butler, SL Viehl, and others that escape me; clearly depict them. But HOW?
I’ve been doing some superficial analysis and it seems that when Humans and aliens interact closely and the alienness is narrowed down to one or two SPECIFIC differences; the ones that somehow cause the problem; that’s when the aliens are acceptable.
For example, CJ Cherryh’s atevi. Basically giant Humans with golden eyes and coal black skin, bipedal, five digits, and sexually compatible with Humans (though not reproductively compatible); have one difference: they have no concept of love. In place of love, they have a profound sense of association. All large, mammalian life forms on the Earth of the atevi have this same biological urge – to associate under one strong leader. The single Human who interacts with them, Bren Cameron, understands this and can speak their language fluently – but he still makes mistakes when under pressure to assume that the atevi “feel” about him as he does about them. This creates countless situations of tension and have driven the story line for some TWENTY novels over a quarter of a century of time. The reason I go back repeatedly is because I want to see what happens next as the Human population grows and the atevi advance in technology and eventually reach parity with Humans; and possibly visit Earth.
Another example is James White’s famous Sector General novels. Twelve novels spanning over thirty years of writing, they depict the life of a small group of Humans on a massive space station away from the “main thoroughfares” of a vast interstellar civilization as they interact with countless alien cultures and medical personnel. Languages, medicine, morality, humor, and emotions are touchstones – and points of conflict – for the series.
So – what have I learned with my brief analysis?
1) Aliens and Humans HAVE to interact closely; intimately. (I tried this with “May They Rest” and it was quickly bounced by five magazines and my favorite, to which I’d sold several stories…) In “A Complications of Santients”, my character and an alien, “cockroach” sentient interacted VERY intimately – and didn’t sell…
2) I need more aliens than Humans. I did this in “Peanut Butter and Jellyfish”, podcast from CAST OF WONDERS. It took place on a trimaran carrying cultural exchange WheetAh. Humans need to be at a disadvantage. The aliens should be at an advantage.
3) It needs to be a BROADLY threatening situation. I think I did this in “The Princess’s Brain”, but I’ve got to go back and reread it. I DID do this in “The Krasiman, Monkey Boy, and the Frogfather”, but that didn’t sell, either.
So, I’m ready to try something new. Cron plus the above…should give me an alien story that will sell.
- THE MANY WORLDS OF GUYI write lots of things! I’ve been writing science fiction for adults for decades; but I’ve also written science fiction for younger audiences (see links to my online fiction to the right!). I LOVE essays on all KINDS of things. Also to the right, you can see where my works have been published — some professional, some semi-pro, and some gratis. Try each link to get a feel of what I do!
- EMERALD OF EARTH (my YA novel) A short story, “Blight on the Beanstalk”
Interested in reading an excerpt from my first novel, EMERALD OF EARTH: Heirs of the Shattered Spheres?
If you are, follow the link; it will bring you to a smaller website of mine where I keep sort of…loose links. That’s where you’ll find “Blight On The Beanstalk”, a 2500 word short story that lifts an incident from the book and introduces most of the main characters and offers a look at the world Emerald Marcillon lives in.
