You’re looking at a piece of another world. (For real.)

Took the picture recently, but I purchased the rock, probably a basalt meteorite, a decade ago at a gem and rock festival in rural Missouri. Now the rock sits on the window ledge in my tiny study that looks out over Arizona desert and mountains. It is my anchor in the starry sea of an otherwise unknown universe.

I write science fiction, but I’ve never left Earth.

My books take people to distant planets, many of them Hab-Worlds where intelligent life has evolved. Naturally, readers meet an array of aliens. Blue Quirt-Thymeans with short, floppy ears; red Tarkians, who are basically peaceful but could pass for the Devil on Halloween. The jolly, amorphous Carrooban Flock, who need to laugh every few minutes or their nervous systems crash and they die. And lots of humanoids who resemble us. I’ve got a sci-fi gobbledygook explanation for that. Check Dr. Wolfgang Ziegler in the glossary of most Tom Shepherd books.

There are cities with wide canals, crystalline towers, old fortresses by a sea under a night sky with multiple moons, and starships galore. But sometimes, I wonder if anything is really “out there” physically.

That’s where the chunk of basalt you’re looking at comes to my rescue. See the burnished edge? It’s one of the keys to identify meteorites. When the Earth’s gravity snags these space rocks, their descent through the atmosphere heats the leading edge to the melting point leaving soft rock that cools to a smoother surface. Meteors crash and break, flinging bits of meteorite for future rock hounds to discover.

Now, okay. The piece of basalt on my window shelf probably isn’t from another “world” and certainly not an inhabited one — I hope! Although if it’s basalt — I’m no geologist — it suggests formation in magma of a planet with active volcanoes. Also, the asteroid Vesta in our solar system seems to have spawned basalt meteors. So, maybe?

Wherever it originated, the smooth stone provides tangible evidence of other rocky places, like Earth, out there in the Cosmos. It isn’t all twinkle, twinkle in the sky. There are places where we can stand and look up and trace new constellations. It isn’t just a sci-fi dream, like dragons in the mist over make-believe earths. If there are dragons out there, they gotta land somewhere. I have a rock. It’s from out there, somewhere.

Maybe that doesn’t make sense to anybody but a lunatic who writes science fiction about attorneys who get humans out of trouble on distant worlds (my Star Lawyers series). But the rock says, “Why not? Something real is out there. I know. I’m from deep space.”

Read (or write) a little sci-fi. Maybe the Universe will speak its amazing possibilities through you.

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