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August 30, 1990   (scribbled notation says “mailed 8-22-90”)

George Sampson
KTEH 54
100 Skyport Drive
San Jose, CA  95110-1301
Dear Mr. Sampson:
Hi, it’s me again. OK. This is what I figured out.
If your station is going to be Earth’s official welcoming comittee for beings outside of the Solar System, maybe you can borrow some tactics from Continue reading →

But the buzz I got from the first contest stayed with me, and I ran with the concept of communicating with extra-terrestrial beings.  The contests stopped, but I kept writing to George Sampson anyway, and by August of that year had established key characters in the Senders saga:  Maud Clemens, Lucy (Lisa, Lysa, Leeza Meitner), and a ditsy me later to be named Jane Malthus.  I had also established that the Senders were seeking information, and the only way to give them the information was through broadcasting, probably derived from Ray Bradbury’s story about helpless astronauts spinning away from their spaceship, drifting through a “cloud” of Earth’s radio transmissions bearing snippets from a world they would never see again.   My letter to George Sampson in August of 1990 indicates an on-going, one-sided correspondence:

My efforts in subsequent KTEH Science 54 Fiction Night contests did not fare as well.  In particular, one contest provided us with an imaginary time machine and asked what we would do with it.  I put together a team of linguistic experts who travelled back to biblical times and used their influence to amend the Bible to include commandments on using birth control.  From comments made by George Sampson’s vacation time stand-in, I gathered that was not a popular response.

My t-shirt-winning response to the KTEH challenge was as follows:

Question One:  How can we establish permenant, peaceful, and mutally beneficial communication?

Question Two: Can you provide me with documents written in Earth English which explain in detail your physiological and psychological make-up, the entire history of your species, including the location of your planet, and the physics and mechanics behind your mode of interstellar/interplanetary travel?

Question Three:  Would you like a cup of tea?

Looking back through the files relating to The Senders of Shaula I’ve accumulated over the years, I came across letters that reminded me of the true origin of the characters.  In 1990 the television station KTEH 54 had a weekly “Science Fiction Night” hosted by George Sampson.  We regularly tuned in for “Dr Who” “Blake’s 7” “Red Dwarf” and “The Prisoner.”  To increase viewership, George started a series of small contests, in which viewers sent in responses to various instructions.  I was jazzed when I got “First Runner Up” for the first contest (and won a “Prisoner” t-shirt.)  The first contest was “Aliens who land in your backyard will talk only to you and have only enough power to answer three questions. What are your questions?”

The Vandenberg protest was a few years later.

The primary reason we went to the Vandenberg protest was to
give support to a member of our local activist group who had decided to get herself arrested for trespassing. It was her first time, and she was very nervous about it. She wasn’t driving at all at that time, and for some reason
her husband couldn’t drive her down to Vandenberg, so she planned to take a
train or the bus.  We offered to drive her down instead.

Her husband dropped her off at our house, then we loaded the whole family and one of the kids’ friends into the seven-seatbelt mini-van and made a day of it.  It was a long day.  The procedure of getting arrested and processed took a long time.  When lunchtime rolled
around, we were still waiting for the arrest to take place. The kids got out the cooler to make their sandwiches. When I had packed the cooler I had thrown in a knife to use for slicing cheese. That was a mistake.  It was a full-sized kitchen knife, with a
blade of seven or eight inches.  Security people saw the kids using the knife, and just about arrested them.

The experience of trespassing and being arrested for the first time was stressful enough to our acquaintance that, once we got back to our house, she needed to just sit and relax in the  family room, in a chair near the door to my office, while she waited for her husband to come pick her up.  I went into the kitchen to fix dinner, but all she wanted to eat was an apple.  I can still picture her huddled in that chair, recovering from the stress.  That image got worked into the Senders screenplay at Leza’s first moment of crisis, and the image of the small female surrounded by stern guards because she had stepped across the line found its place in the scene at the Labs’ Community Day.

Two events that contributed to the Senders of Shaula were a
Tri-Valley CAREs  protest at the gates of the Livermore National Labs, and a protest at Vandenberg AFB.

For the Livermore event I took along a sign with the Senders
signature (<<?>>) and another sign that said something like “PU239
to you too.”  While we were there, my
son, still quite young, sat down in the dirt. Since I had been reading the
“Citizen Watch” reports about the radioactive contamination of the area, it
scared me, and I made a big deal about getting him up out of the dirt, loud
enough so lab workers inside the fence could hear me.  “You can’t play in the dirt here. You don’t
know what’s in it! Let’s go wash your hands!”

I don’t think that incident made it into the letters Jane
wrote to the President, but later when I was working on the screenplay, the
scenes at the park and the gates of the labs gave me places to work it in.