Lonely Planets
The Natural Philosophy of Alien Life
Chapter OneSpirits from the Vasty Deep
We have all felt this impulse in our childhood as our
ancestors did before us, when they conjured goblins
and spirits from the vasty void, and if our energy
continue we never cease to feel its force through life.
We but exchange, as our years increase, the romance
of fiction for the more thrilling romance of fact.
-- Percival Lowell
I can call spirits from the vasty deep.
Why, so can I, or so can any man, but will they come
when you do call for them?
—Shakespeare, Henry IV
Prologue: Bruised by An Alien
It was a dark and stormy night -- and already a weird one. My friend
Damon and I trudged around through a snowstorm in the Meatpacking
District, hunting for a spoken-word/hip-hop/acid-jazz event someone had
said we had to see, while the wind whipped the streets into soft, majestic
canyons. We were ants lost in a liquid-filled snowy Manhattan, and somebody
up there was giving it a good shake. After hours of increasingly
blind and frozen searching, we ducked into a corner bar where a jazz
quartet was only slightly mangling Coltrane's "Out of This World" and
...
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