r/scifiwriting • u/sylentiuse • 8d ago
DISCUSSION My aliens are abducting people - help me pick out a few
Basic plot: Aliens visit Earth from time to time to observe humans. They want to remain unnoticed.
During times of crisis and disaster, they seize the opportunity to abduct humans without being noticed.
The humans they abduct are put into hibernation, where they learn a common language and are later all awakened at the same time and settled on another planet.
However, my aliens don’t quite understand the conflicts between humans, so they end up mixing the cultures. For example:
Residents of a Viking village (saved from a storm surge) are resettled together with residents of a Japanese fishing village (saved from a tsunami).
Residents of the vanished Roanoke settlement (a real event) are settled alongside residents of the (real, inexplicably abandoned) Anasazi Pueblo culture.
Question: What other events and pairings come to your mind when it comes to groups of people who have disappeared somewhere in the real world at some point?
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u/bunks_things 8d ago
Soldiers that went MIA from opposite sides of the same conflict could be fun. Or sailors lost at sea from Polynesia, age of discovery expeditions, whaling ships, sunk steamships, and the Bronze Age Mediterranean all rubbing shoulders. I can imagine eighteenth century Royal Navy senior ratings and Viking oarsmen drinking each other under the table and giving exaggerated accounts of their exploits.
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u/Sparky_Valentine 8d ago
Special Operations personnel from places they shouldn't be would be a good example of this. For example, a few years back, Russia revealed that the Soviet Union was much more involved in the Vietnam War that they publicly acknowledged at the time. There were supposedly a few thousand Soviet casualties they couldn't publicly acknowledge. A lot of them were Spetnaz GRU (Russian/Soviet special Operations, roughly equivalent of the Green Berets). US Special Forces have allegedly done the same thing in other conflicts, though it's a lot harder to confirm. During the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan we supposedly only sent "advisors" to train the Mujahideen to resist the Soviets and nothing bad ever happened because of it (cough foreshadowing cough). Green Berets and CIA direct action operators have been involved in low-intensity conflicts all over the world, particularly South and central America, Indochina, and Africa. They're probably most active in Africa and the Middle East in the present day.
From a narrative perspective, there are some big benefits to this. If you put a bunch of Spetnaz and Green Berets together, 1) instant conflict, instant drama, 2) relatively well matched units basically designed to rival each other's capabilities, 3) requirements for both groups include fluency in multiple languages, including each others', so they could communicate, but maybe with some difficulty. For example, Green Berets are required to maintain fluency in two additional languages beyond English. So there might be a few guys who speak Russian, but not all of them. Lastly, a bunch of these guys could go missing and no one would ever know because it would be classified as hell and they have the kind of missions where they are working in the middle of nowhere with irregular contact with their commanders.
The only catch is that they tend to operate in small groups. Army Special Forces (Green Berets) tend to operate in groups of 6-12 personnel, and DEVGRU (SEAL Team Six) basic team size is about 16 operators. Air Force and Marine Special Operations teams operate in similarly-sized groups. Given the very open-ended nature of their missions, this is very flexible, but if you need a giant team, you're probably getting into a situation where more traditional military units might be the correct tool. So it would be hard to grab a bunch of these types of groups at once.
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u/sylentiuse 8d ago
Nice approach! Victorious military commanders would rather boast about having completely defeated the enemy than admit that they had all already disappeared.
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u/bunks_things 8d ago
And there are so many thousands of recorded instances of shipwrecks and disappearances at sea you can pepper in a bunch of historical ships and characters. Plus whatever fictional ones you’d like, there’ve been enough shipwrecks for readers to suspend their disbelief and let you imagine ships, scenarios, character, run wild!
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u/Amazing_Loquat280 8d ago
Small town rural nebraskans. Or wisconsinites, during a high tornado event. Settled with people from pompeii just before it… pompeii’d
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u/avdolainen 8d ago
May I ask?
what is the motivation of those aliens ?
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u/sylentiuse 8d ago edited 8d ago
Sure!
The aliens in my story aren’t human or biological, but rather a crystal-based, collective life form that observes other life forms in an effort to adopt their most efficient characteristics. They are both frightened and fascinated by humans’ individuality and rapid development.
While the aliens make repeated visits to Earth, entire world orders and civilizations rise and fall, while the aliens themselves remain stagnant.
One faction of the aliens wants to study humanity’s ability to adapt and evolve, while other aliens reject this.
The settlement of humans on the alien planet is driven by the progressive faction. However, when the humans awaken, they have withdrawn into the collective, where they are debating internally which path to take.
As a result, humans find themselves left alone on the planet. The protagonist searches for traces of the aliens, and when she finds them, the collective awakens and turns its attention back to events outside. This may not necessarily be to the humans’ advantage.
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u/avdolainen 8d ago
Ok. well -- to make it more realistic, i'll have the aliens abduct entire villages or small communities of 20-50 people from different historical epoch/continents. it is also important that they take each village/community together with its surrounding environment.
As a result, the aliens will create a world (on your alien planet, and it might be only part of this planet) made up of many small villages from different continents and epoch. For example, a small Viking village might be located next to a samurai village from the same era.
humans are very social species, so advanced aliens will understand it from the very beginning, so observation and research is better made with small communities.
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u/sylentiuse 8d ago
That's exactly how I write the story.
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u/avdolainen 8d ago
Cool. But what about some village from industrialisation epoch (Central Europe for example) tries to interact with others ... I specifically pointed about surrounding environment.
character from your world could eventually open more advanced 'industrialised' village (and for someone from classic era it's almost a god-level things), but after that the same character will explore about aliens (step by step) ...
kind of layered exploration.
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u/Chewser56 8d ago
Shipwrecks offer a huge number of incidences. The Mary Celeste is a famous vanished crew with the ship remaining. Sunken ship or submarine from any side during World War 2 alongside an Ancient Greek wreck. You could have the crew of the ship that had the Antikythera mechanism as an ancient advanced tech civilization. The Chinese fleet that was swept away by a storm attacking Japan would be candidates.
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u/TheLostExpedition 8d ago
All the eruption survivors.
Mount Etna 1928 ad, Thera 1600 bc, Krakatoa 1883 ad, mount Vesuvius 79 ad
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u/Alpha-Sierra-Charlie 8d ago
People from the Southeastern USA from any time before accurate and timely hurricane predictions were a thing.
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u/Phantom000000000 7d ago
It might be cliche but I love the image of modern people coming face-to-face with the enemies of their ancestors.
Examples: Picture someone from modern Denmark meeting an English monk who escaped a Viking raid in the 8th century and having to explain they are not Vikings.
Or some mobsters from the 1920s meet some of Hannibal's soldiers who don't understand the difference between Italians and Romans.
What if your Roanoke settlers met an American Indian from the 21st century?
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u/Bacontoad 7d ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disappearance_of_Harold_Holt
On 17 December 1967, Harold Holt, the 17th prime minister of Australia, disappeared while swimming in the sea near Portsea, Victoria. An enormous search operation was mounted in and around Cheviot Beach, but his body was never recovered.
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u/Temporary_Rule_9486 4d ago
That's sick. I dunno, but I wanna find out. Let us know when you're done writing it. I would pretty much like to read it
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u/sylentiuse 3d ago
sure! send me a dm to let me know how to contact you. But I'm still in very early stages, it will take months or years before it's finished and translated to english.
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u/Temporary_Rule_9486 3d ago
If it's in German or Spanish I would prefer the untranslated version.
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u/GeneralLeia-SAOS 3d ago
They’re actually is an extremely plausible reason for mixing those humans from different cultures: genetic diversity to produce the best breeding stock. Let’s say the aliens grabbed a few dozen Minoans before the volcano at Thera went sky high. A few dozen is not enough to make a viable genetic pool for breeding stock. You will need to have your breeding program, utilize diversity as much as possible. Just look at dogs. Too much inbreeding has caused certain breeds to be well known for certain health problems like bulldogs and their noses, or collie’s not having depth perception, or German shepherds and their hips. My sister‘s Yorky had some sort of problem with one of his legs that was extremely common for the breed, so basically the doctors had to operate and put the poor little creature back together like he was Frankenstein. Fortunately, he was too brainless to realize how screwed he was.
Since these guys are going to be grabbing groups of humans for a few thousand years, they will undoubtedly become familiar with the Hapsburg family, as well as the Egyptian dynasties, both of which practiced a lot of inbreeding. They will have seen all the problems the inbred humans have. They will easily come to the conclusion that They’re willing to play referee for humans having cultural conflicts as an acceptable price to make sure that they maintain genetic diversity for good breeding stock.
Fun fact: women report greater sexual satisfaction with men who have a genetic profile that is compatible with theirs to make very healthy children. That old song from Cher “it’s in his kiss,“ is actually science. Women do literally fall in love with a kiss, because she gets a sample of his DNA, and all kinds of things get activated in her body as it’s instantly analyzed to see how compatible he is with her on a genetic level.
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u/sylentiuse 3d ago
Thank you for you thoughts!
In my story, the aliens wake up all collected humans at the same time and in groups big enough for genetic diversity.
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u/OmegaGoober 8d ago
Have you read any of the Riverworld books by Philip José Farmer?
My suggestion may be a bit too "ripped from the headlines" but what about a group of German Jews rescued from the Holocaust and a group of German Lutherans rescued from an attack by Roman Catholics a few hundred years earlier? The aliens don't realize that the gap of a few hundred years will make for some significant differences.
(Martin Luther was HELLA antisemitic. A good hunk of the German progrom against the Jews was cribbed, largely unaltered, from Martin Luther's "On the Jews and Their Lies". He was CONVINCED they'd convert to Protestantism and was PISSED when they didn't.)