[originally posted: 1/4/2017]
If there were a mutation that would launch mankind into the next era of evolution, or if there were a species out there superior to and more intelligent/advanced than human beings, I think there are two traits that could make this possible: inheriting memories/knowledge/skills from parents (genetic memory) and communicating with our bodies on a cellular level, like being aware of a pathogen the moment it is in the body and not just the consequent physiology of being sick.
I started writing a book when I was in middle school. I wrote a chapter every couple of days–my friends all had characters named after them and they would read each installment. Any kid we didn’t like became one of the bad guy, got killed off, or acquired an otherwise embarrassing fate.
I got over a hundred pages in before I realized the novelty of it was being an inside joke but the actual plot was pretty horrible. The title was ‘It’s Coming’–the coming of an alien takeover. The story was about aliens abducting one of the main characters and replacing the tissue in her hand with cartilage…The aliens could control it and make it do things. The town was inhabited by sleeper/spy aliens and the protagonist ER doctor that would unravel the whole thing was married to a defected alien that had left his group out of love and in the interest of protecting her. Very cliche…
One of my favorite novels is Congo, not so much for the story itself, but for te fact that it’s sprinkled with chapters about research and scientific case studies involving primates learning sign language, their behavior, and how they even passed down the skill by teacher their children sign language. Those parts made it really captivating.
From that, I’ve adopted the style that any story I wrote would have an underlying theme or two to interweave fact and fiction. A deeper level of intrigue could be brought to even a cliche alien takeover to become something other than a tired overdone tale. For example, developing a theory on how genetic memory or super-sensitive cell communication was influential to how this alien race is advanced enough to infiltrate Earth, or why they would be interested in experimenting with cartilage from its existing properties in cartilaginous fish, like sharks, and its current application in the medical industry.