In this article ❧ I explain you how Science Fiction and Fantasy are similar and Different, so you can decide which novel you'll write.

I feel sluggish before intellectual fiction. The cause could be that it is bookish and disdainful, an attempt to pull a few people away from 99% of the population. Despite its highbrow breath, I think there is a spark of genius in  Think Like A Dinosaur (James Patrick Kelly, 1995) that puts the story one step beyond the intellectual realm.

The best in this text is the combination of physics, humor, and horror to render a short story that reads like cutting butter. (Actually, the coolest thing may be that it  reads like cutting butter. )

Patrick Kelly handles Time like an intellectual. The reader has to wait for nearly two pages to know they are on June 22, 2069. This strategy is the opposite of, for example, romance fiction, in which you find the date at the very beginning; Patrick aligns here with literary historical fiction.

Sometimes Kelly turns intellectual burdens into intuitive images. That’s the case in the following Michael’s thought of why Kamala picked to study how to grow artificial eyes: “no doubt she (Kamala) had a blind grandma or second cousin just waiting for her to bring home those artificial eyes.” Kelly knew how scholars use to choose their research subjects. Scholars make decisions based on personal feelings and, unaware or unwilling to recognize them, they wrap science up with objectivity clothes. The same happens when it is commented on the possibility of a sapientologist presenting a paper on the Hanen's concept of identity. Those are the kind of questions an anthropologist does.

Kamala and Michael

What pulls the reader into the story is the conversation between two vibrant characters: Kamala —an arrogant and kind of sexy scientist— and Michael Burrs —a funny and little cynical sapientologist (he ends up being an assassin). If the reader is a man, he wants to know Kamala through Michael’s eyes. Michael conveys that he wants to make an emotional connection for some reason. Due to the description of Kamala,one tends to assume Michael’s motives are erotic. If the reader is a woman, she may want to figure out what Michael’s feelings are, why he is that interested, and why he wants to know a Kamala's secret (he offers to tell her a secret and asks her to tell one).

The narrative structure represents the emotional plot. Kamala arrives at Tuulen Station, a platform to migrate to Gend, a planet dwelled by Dinos. Michael has to assist her during the “quantum scan” the method the Dinos devised to travel the space; somehow, Michael is excited with Kamala, but she’s out of reach. Kamala meets Sillion; Sillion is funny. Kamala likes Michael and tells him the story of the grave of Father Tom. He says that he wanted to distract her. At that point, I was eager to know more about them (especially Kamala). Why? the description of Kamala and her attitude of subtle arrogance.

Then, the story intercalates Kamala’s story with the (erotic and technological) preparation for migration. After Michael prepares her body, “the big blue marble retracted its tongue” to get Kamala into: I just want to know what is going to happen with Kamala’s body (about to be “translated” into a distant planet).

Inside the marble, a ghost from Kamala’s past loomed (because she told Michael a bit of that story before getting inside the marble). After that, things got crazy. The sequence goes like this. Kamala’s trip is not going well, she yells and eventually is freed from the marble, Kamala’s equation is not in balance, the person Michael has been talking with for the last minutes was a “redundancy” —no longer a person: the “redundant” had to come back into the marble, and Michael knows she’s not going anywhere near the marble, because the issue disturbed her.

When Michael realized Kamala has been in the marble for six minutes —longer than anybody— an atmosphere of mystery raises: he wants to approach the marble and to hear if there are any sounds coming from.

You know the rest of the story: Michael kills Kamala (her redundancy) and physical paradoxes happens.

Inserting Stories in the Main Story

The story about Father Tom and Mama Moogo introduces a twist and keeps the curiosity about the characters. The way Kelly inserts it in the plot, reminded me of Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino, 1994) because is a mix of humor, cozy horror, and action. This scene comes after Michael asks Kamala to tell a personal story, a secret. Kamala feels he is crazy, so Michael offers a hilarious response (at this point, I saw Buddy Allen): “You are crazy.", says Kamala. "Actually, I believe the technical term is logomaniac. It's from the Greek: logos meaning word, mania meaning two bits short of a byte. I just love to chat is all. Tell you what, I'll go first. If my secret isn't juicy enough, you don't have to tell me anything.”says Michael.

Dino Humor and Ways to Innovate

Humor is outstanding. Kelly handles to combine morbid and grotesque things with funny characters and situations. A good example is Silloin, a clever dinosaur that runs things in the station but behaves like a predator. One funny scene occurs when Silloin —a mix of physicist, mathematician, and computer scientist) shows off her teeth (long “as piano keys”) to persuade Michael to do something.

Kelly implemented a specific method to differentiate human utterances from dinos vocal sounds (they communicate with each other through ear translators. For example:

"The dinos were skirring at each other; their heads wove and dipped. At first they cut me cold and the comm was silent, but suddenly their debate crackled through my earstone.

=This is just as I have been telling,= said Linna. =These beings have no realization of harmony. It is wrongful to further unleash them on the many worlds.=

=You may have reason,= said Parikkal.=But that is a later discussion. The need is for the equation to be balanced.= "

I would like to know whether this was Kelly's invention. I suspect it was not. Still, I think is a remarkable example of a simple way to use typography to achieve a narrative goal (visually, the reader grasps how the utterances contribute to the atmosphere).

How to Use Technology?

Science Fiction is perhaps the most peculiar method to predict the future. When we watch a movie or read a book of Science Fiction, we expect to see one of our possible futures. Dystopia and utopia are the main archetypes of human destiny in Science Fiction, but sometimes we find combinations of both. I think Kelly’s story is 70% dystopia and 30 % utopia. 

Technological milestones account for utopia. See this scene: “Silloin closed circuits which filled the fogger with a dense cloud of nano lenses. The nano stuck to Kamala and deployed, coating the surface of her body. As she breathed them, they passed from her lungs into her bloodstream.”. Science allows these creatures to make magic.

Side effects include communication issues between dinosaurs and humans and a human murdering a kind of clone of a woman.

Borges’ Technology

While I was reading Kelly, I remembered Borges two times. First, I remembered Borges’  Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertious. He used Schopenhauer’s and De Quincy’s philosophies to build the small universe of Tlön. James Patrick Kelly used physics to create a humorous horror furnished by intelligent dinosaurs.

At some point, Borges’  Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote came to my mind too. I felt compelled to rewrite an excerpt of  Think Like a Dinosaur. My version may look the same (what I propose is subtle). In  Pierre Menard, Borges wrote twice a part of the Quixote to show that the same means different in different contexts.

In the original, Kelly says:

“I've guided maybe three hundred migrations—comings and goings—since I first came to Tuulen to study the dinos. Kamala Shastri's is the only quantum scan I've ever pirated. I doubt that the dinos care; I suspect this is a trespass they occasionally allow themselves. I know more about her—at least, as she was three years ago—than I know about myself. When the dinos sent her to Gend, she massed 50,391.72 grams and her red cell count was 4.81 million per mm[3]. She could play the nagasvaram, a kind of bamboo flute. Her father came from Thana, near Bombay, and her favorite flavor of chewyfrute was watermelon and she'd had five lovers and when she was eleven she had wanted to be a gymnast but instead she had become a biomaterials engineer who at age twenty-nine had volunteered to go to the stars to learn how to grow artificial eyes. It took her two years to go through migrator training; she knew could have backed out at any time, right up until the moment Silloin translated her into a superluminal signal. It was explained to her many times what it meant to balance the equation.

In my version, it goes:

“I've guided hundreds of migrations—comings  and goings—since I first came to Tuulen to study the dinos. Kamala Shastri's is the only quantum scan I've ever pirated. I doubt dinos care; I suspect this is a trespass they occasionally allow themselves. I know more about her—at least, as she was three years ago—than I know about myself. When the dinos sent her to Gend, she massed 50,391.72 grams , and her red cell count was 4.81 million per  millimeter. She could play the nagasvaram, a kind of bamboo flute. 

Kamala’s father came from Thana, near Bombay. Her favorite flavor of chewyfrute was watermelo n, she'd had five lovers , and she had wanted to be a gymnast but instead she had become a biomaterials engineer who at age twenty-nine had volunteered to go to the stars to learn how to grow artificial eyes. 

It took her two years to go through migrator training; she knew she could have backed out at any time, right up until the moment Silloin translated her into a superluminal signal. It was explained to her many times what it meant to balance the equation.”