The Oracle

Gold Rush 2001: A Space Oddity

The Oracle

The Oracle is a First Contact novel set during World War II and the German occupation of Greece.

Mild spoilers to follow

While writing The Oracle, I was struck by the realization that all stories are stories within stories. Pick any novel, or any historical event for that matter, and you’re looking at a story within a larger story. And this is true even of our lives. No one stands alone. We live in the context of our families, our cultures and our times, and we can’t be understood outside of them. This was particularly true of those in the Second World War, where individuals were caught up and swept along in the current of death and destruction in the fight for freedom.

In The Oracle, I look at how First Contact shapes our perception of ourselves, and examine the possibility of contact through the eyes of a naive young German soldier coming to grips with the harsh reality of war. In an unabashed callback to Indiana Jones, the Germans are in search of a primitive wunderweapon, seeking some divine talisman to win the war. And in this novel, that takes the form of the legend of the Oracle of Delphi, treating it as a historical account rather than a myth. In my novel, rather than being supernatural, the Oracle is extraterrestrial in origin.

The leichter Panzerspähwagen was a light-armored vehicle used in Greece by the Germans.

This is First Contact, but from the perspective of extraterrestrials rather than humans, with an intelligent alien species grappling to understand the warlike nature of humanity.

Humans are curiosities. On the level of the individual, for the most part, we’re warm and kind and nurture our families, but collectively we’re driven by culture, ideology and religion, which are often used as excuses for selfishness, prejudice and bigotry. And when taken to an extreme, these result in war. Perhaps I’m naive, but I think war is a tool to oppress and exploit others without merit. War is might-makes-right, only it doesn’t.

There are no winners in war, only losers. At the outset of any war, the only real question is who will lose the most? Whoever loses the least amount of land, people, resources and pride, we crown as the winner.

World War II was particularly brutal as it was a clash of naked aggression in the desire for power against the idea that people have the right to self-determination and the freedom to live in peace.

In 1943, Norman Rockwell painted the Four Freedoms to help raise war bonds—and 80 years later, I think they’re still relevant: the freedom of worship, the freedom of speech, the freedom from fear and the freedom from want. It strikes me that all wars revolve around one or more of these concepts, either in defense of them or to take them away from people. These four freedoms/values are really the only way to understand war.