Some people welcome the alien "liberators" and their laws but a lot of us are madder than whatever and try to fight the "alien overlords" and their "oppressive cultural imperialism".

Any why are they sticking their noses into this?
Who's paying their costs?
Where are they from?
If they are so peaceful why do they have the weaponry to take over a planet?
What are they eating, and where are they staying?
How do they know our language?
If they are so tech. advanced how is possible to resist at all?
If any violence is, for them, wrong than how did they survive on their planet? (Assuming a carnivor-hebavor-etc. chain)
The more I think about it, more obvious questions arise...

You can even give the aliens television sets (if they have any technology, this wouldn't be too hard to pull off), and they accidently tapped into our television broadcasts but they don't know what it is. Thus, when the scientists land, they are preceived as gods.

What I don't like about the idea is that (1) it sounds too much like A Stranger in a Strange Land and (2) I really don't like the notion of the aliens being messiah-figures.

It touches on part of the reason Osama Bin Laden hates America so much. In his culture, people behave themselves because the temptations to misbehave are removed. American culture, which allows scantily-clad women to prance around on Baywatch and everyone to have a beer when it's Miller Time, induces and even encourages evil. I think Osama really would view our TV as the worst pollution in the world.

How can you say why he does anything?

" In his culture,people behave themselves because the temptations to misbehave are removed. "
lol, that's like saying by taking away food from people they won't eat.

Anyway, please let's not turn this into a political debate, and stick to talking about Survivor's ideas - so feel free to ignore my rant.

Phanto outlined most of the major questions involved. If you can explain them all in a story and you don't make the reader go 'Huh?' then by all means, go for it.

I had a conversation recently with a friend of mine, and we came to the conclusion that there's only about five or six truely origional ideas left out there. What you need to do is look at something in an interesting way. So if your idea has already been done, it doesn't matter. What you need to do is find a way to look at it like no one else has.

Answering Phanto's comments:

The aliens care about this because anyone in their multi-species culture can configure a fairly ordinary communications device to intercept and decode our transmissions. Once our language was decoded and they realized the implications of the content of what we were broadcasting, all reputable researchers stopped watching them, but there has been a growing underculture of terrorism, violence, carnality, and nihilism in their previously very peaceful society fed by secret consumers of our cultural "filth". It has been going on for decades, and despite attempts to set up jamming and so forth, our technology relies on far more powerful signels than the aliens are accustomed to using (they have advanced in the direction of greater sensitivity and refinement, technologically as well as culturally).

The costs of the diplomatic mission were funded originally by the interstellar federation, and the current "invasion" is also funded by that government, because they really have a serious problem as a result of our increasingly violent and carnal broadcasts.

"They" are from a couple of thousand different worlds, though only the nearest hundred or so are close enough to Earth to have recieved our broadcasts.

They are peaceful, but technologically advanced. They don't want to take us over directly by brute force, for the most part their method is to offer really good deals in exchange for getting their way. They don't even use lethal weapons (though they do use a sort of "brain reformatting" regression on some really bad individuals). They studied our language intensely before realizing whar our broadcasts contained, so they all talk in fiftiesish dialects of the various major languages on TV back then But because they are so peaceful and nonviolent, human guerrillas can often manage to inflict some degree of harm on them without too much risk (aside from being caught and sent to a really posh rehab--unless they decide to reformat your brain).

Their culture has no problem with violence against nonsentient life at all, in fact, they don't even make a distinction between "living" and "nonliving"--a sentient computer has the same rights as a human would have under their law, and a fish has about the same rights as a rock (various higher animals have intermediate levels of rights in their law). A human built supercomputer might have about the same rights as a dog, dolphins are about the level of the computers that run the aliens ships (thus the ships themselves are actually citizens, albeit of a tertiary class).

And finally, I didn't say, "pukes at the word SF and what the kind of stuff that entails". I was puking at the implication that a group of science fiction writers would borrow a page from Jordon on what to call themselves.

In Ender's Game the invasion makes no sense at all. The humans have no idea at all exactly why the aliens attacked them, and frankly I can't figure it out either. Sure, they couldn't communicate with us...but shouldn't they have taken a hint when we started shooting at them?

Besides facts like Osama's culture burning only half the duo of out-of-wedlock sexual encounters and cutting off offending limbs for stealing, I remember the old USSR had great problems with prostitution, which dilemma they simply denied existed.

Neither a heavy-handedly nor a benevolently repressive regime changes the nature of man. Then, too, those in power--whether in suppressive regimes or just societies--seem hell-bent on proving the old adage about the corrupting influence of power.

My impression is that Survivor's story idea touches on the most important issue of the 21st century: what is the nature of human free will?

Generally, Western philosophers subscribe to a causeless free will. It does not matter if you've been exposed to viloence and pronography all your life, you alone are responsible for the assaults, murders, rapes, and adultry you commit.

But many Eastern thinkers differ on the point. Budhists have this thought that we are not captains of our own ships, that our thoughts and actions are influenced by the world around us. In some respects Islam takes it a step further: having sex out of wedlock is a sin, but the cause of the sin is sexual arousal. It is a woman's responsibility to make sure that no man but her husband ever experience any arousal from seeing her. Their rules on alcohol and many food products are similar.

To them the sinner is responsible for the sin, but the tempter is also responsible. This is very different from our culture, in which the tempter bears no responsibility.

Suppose a highly advanced alien race held some variation of the Eastern philosophy. If their rates of adultry and drug abuse were increasing, they might blame our broadcasts. Even as they punish their adulterers, they'd be sending a fleet to punish us!

What sort of punishment would they impose?

Assuming they gave us the opportunity to justify ourselves, what sort of defense would we present?

This could be very cool!

The natural assumption is that aliens would at minimum have their own cultural and ethical morays, and at most would be so different from us physically, mentally, and emotionally that they'd neither understand nor form a strong opinion of our entertainment at all. What is their context for understanding "necessary" human violence, (i.e. war in a just cause)? Are they ultra-pacifists, in whose society violence is never acceptable? Can they discern comedic violence from serious (i.e., cartoons)?

quote:

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Urh..rruogh...hak ak
Okay, now that I've finished throwing up at the implications for what we are including as science fiction....

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besides for the lack of smileys, this is the quote I derived that from. Thanks for explaining what it meant -- the way it's phrased seems closer to my interpertation of it, though.

I refuse to discuss politics in this thread, if you want to debate contact me at my email, yos@gis.net.

isn't one of the primary functions of SF to serve as commentary on society and the ramifications of some sort of change (albeit in SF the human figures are often alien and the change is a "futurized" parallel rather than a duplicate). like one novel-length euphemism? that's always been my take anyway.

TTFN & lol

As for logistics, I'm assuming that they have faster than light travel and are actively working on jamming our signels to a satisfactory extent. Or they have faster than light communication and can send a fleet from the planet nearest us, so it gets here in only about 20 years after they first decided our broadcasts were posing a real and unavoidable danger to their society. Say five years from now. (Of course, this means that most of the aliens are semi-humaniod looking hermaphoditic invertabrates that reproduce by means of group sex--which they are not shy about doing in public )

They aren't really interested in punishing us, per se. Even brain reformatting is regarded more as a form of extreme medical intervention rather than a punishment (though of course humans call it "zombification" and regard it as a horrifying atrocity). They don't care if our televised violence is real and necessary or pretend and gratuitous, all they care about is that it deomonstrably causes anti-social behavior in habitual consumers, and it is also highly addictive to some species.

Anyway, to clear things up a bit, those of us that oppose the aliens regard them much like Osama and Saddam view us, while the aliens view us much the way we view Osama and Saddam. They are invading our planet much as America is invading Iraq--with near irresistable technological and material superiority...but with limited numbers and rigid ethical limitations on the use of violence that can be explioted. They are doing it for reasons that seem perfectly rational to them (and to some of us as well), but the resistence finds their reasons stupid and insist that they are intent on stealing Earth's natural resources or exterminating the human race or some such blather.

The trick, of course, is that I am telling the story from the point of view of a resistance fighter A good ol' American intent on defending the first and second Amendments (as I mentioned, the aliens don't use or condone any form of lethal weapons--and they find all religions that aren't essentially pacifistic unthinkably evil, if you aren't Amish, you're out of luck ).

I really think your biggest problem will be technological credibility. IMO you can't be wimpy or unsure about it. Early in the story, you need to state in absolute terms that the aliens have a way to pick up UHF/VHF signals with great clarity across vast distances at speeds much greater than light. The technology must be ubiquitous, and it must work remotely (that is, there can't be an alien-run relay station near Earth) because responsibility for the broadcasts must lie completely in the hands of the human race. It would also help if the alien civilization depended on the technology for its survival.

The reason I suggest this is that you probably don't want to get stuck with an obvious technological solution to the problem. That's too much of a Star Trekish, win-win, happy ending style for this story. It must be clear from page one that your resistance fighter and the rigidly ethical aliens cannot avoid some sort of conflict.

"Um, Mr. Alien... if you hated our 50s and 60s television... you're REALLY going to hate us in 40 years..." <evil grin> You see... doesn't matter WHAT they do. They're going to be stuck with decades of "bad" TV, and by censoring at the source, it's going to create a massive black market for the programming and the like.

In fact, it would be ironic if the Earthling Resistance fails. We become civilized. And the race falls to civil war and another fleet shows up insisting we start up our bad ways again OR ELSE.

The aliens take an active interest in emerging interstellar cultures, which are fairly rare (out of the billions of stars in the galaxy, less than ten thousand have given birth to sentient cultures...blah blah blah). They've actually had researchers monitoring our planet for the last hundred years. But of course, being a cautious and not particularly aggressive society, they only hang out several light seconds from Earth and try to decipher our radio signals (which are unusually strong, as I've already mentioned). So they are actually up to date on just how bad our television is now. Also, while the nearest alien world is forty light years from Earth, bootleggers can drop right into our solar system, pick up our most recent broadcasts, and beam them instantaneously anywhere in the galaxy (by the way, aliens also learned about bootlegging from human TV). As long as the bootleggers stay a couple of days out from Earth, they're nearly impossible to catch.

So it really isn't entirely Earth's fault that our TV poses a danger to the alien civilization, if the aliens would all just not tune in, it wouldn't matter. The problem is that a small percentage (0.0023% and growing) do consume our entertainment (and news) and act out what they see.

[snip]*

They sought to crush the ancient music because it could spark "evil" in the modern world. Substitute "television" and it seems similar... I think. Am I completely wrong? You're saying that these alien officials want to censor and/or destroy our broadcasting because of its cumulative negative effects. However, these officials are stuck between a rock and a hard place: if they conduce or at least allow the spread of television, more will become effected and pose a danger to society; however, if they try to wipe it out entirely it will cause the contraband distribution of illicit material. Interesting...

* Sorry, but lyrics are copyrighted material and may not be quoted even under Fair Use.

Your alien race will have a weaker moral argument than an Osama-type character. Human TV will be passively pollution-like, while American culture is aggressive. American culture has active salesmen hyping Porky's and Independence Day to foriegn networks. We really should get credit/blame for the consequences, and we know it. It's an interesting position.

But in the case of your aliens, the bootleggers are the ones in the most interesting position. The humans produced the stuff, but non-human bootleggers distribute it. They know the stuff they are selling is "contaminating" the alien culture, but they also believe in something like our Second Amendment.

Thus, you might give your resistance-fighter protagonist a more intense moral conflict with the aliens by giving him an alien bootlegger for a best friend. Or at least have him meet one of the bootleggers during the story.

The bootleggers may not exactly believe in the Second Amendment, but they are generally less shy about violence and other kinds of criminality. But there is absolutely no reasonable scenario in which the protagonist would ever meet or associate with one such. So I guess that will just have to fall by the wayside.

Of course, if the aliens feal the need to liberate us from our violent culture, that's different, but that also puts a very different moral spin on things.

I have confidence that you can make anything work, but I also believe that by splitting the blame between the humans and the bootleggers you will weaken the story's morality. What is the Resistance Movement resisting? The right to transmit violent TV broadcasts? Wouldn't the aliens simply demand that we restrain our violent movies to cable, and keep them off the broadcast and satellite channels? If your hero is so fanatical that he insists that violence must be broadcast to everyone in the galaxy, he's going to lose some reader sympathy.

What if the aliens had made a choice he didn't like? Suppose their choices were a) stop the bootleggers using technology, or b) invade the Earth and impose censorship. Suppose the alien governemnt decided that invading was cheaper? Stopping the bootleggers would cost $1,000,000 and invading Earth would cost $999,999. They invade the Earth to save $1.

Maybe the aliens are trying to pass a tax cut. Sure, they're an advanced civilization with a strict moral code, but a buck is a buck!

Which is why the aliens are trying to totally replace our communications infrastructure...but they can't just give us the technology. They either have to boot-strap (well, technically not) us up to the point where we can implement the technology ourselves (which doesn't resolve the question of whether we will then use that technology the way they tell us and only the way they tell us--not even the aliens are that stupidly naive) or they have to install, maintain, and ensure compliance their own selves. In the first case (which as I've said, they aren't stupid enough to do), they would definitely need to alter our culture significantly for that to be safe. In the latter case (which is what they're opting for), they need to have non-violent humans in charge that they can interface without to much danger.

Like I said, the vast majority of the human race has allowed themselves to be bribed...but some humans have stuck to their guns--as well as their principles.

There is an element of humor in the situation (I mean, the aliens use all sorts of just plain funny non-lethal weapons, like the anti-equipment grenade which causes your clothes to liquify and the orgasmo-ray which immobalizes by means of...well, you know). But the very humor of it makes the issues deadly serious. Is the human race really going to give up our dignity and independence for sex toys and cell phones? There be a lot of people that would fight that pretty hard.