Guest post written by Silver author Olivia Levez
Olivia Levez is the critically acclaimed author of YA novels The Island and The Circus. As well as writing, Olivia spent many years teaching English at a secondary school. She now works freelance as an author, tutor and mentor for students from under-resourced backgrounds, and co-runs writing retreats for Inkwell. Olivia lives in the Midlands and she loves to walk on the Malvern Hills, where a starry night and a snowy day made her wonder about an alien girl landing there, inspiring her third book Silver.
About Silver: Silver is a genre-defying novel on life, love and the universe, tackling themes of identity and belonging, and encompassing elements of romance, and thriller through an alien lense.
I first had the idea of writing Silver when visiting my parents in Wiltshire. Nestling beneath the white horse of Pewsey Vale is the Vale of Pewsey Crop Circle Visitor Centre & Exhibition. I had often seen the famous crop circles in nearby Alton Barnes so maybe it wasn’t surprising that my thoughts turned to writing an alien protagonist.
Recent years have seen an emergence of UFOs as a cultural phenomenon in the arts and the media. This fascination can be traced back to a blend of societal anxieties, such as the rise of conspiracy culture, questions about what it means to belong, and an increased appetite for exploring existential questions through storytelling. Mostly, I believe it is our need to empathise with the ‘other’.
In Silver, my protagonist is charged with the mission of scouting Earth in preparation for colonisation by her people, the Charybdians. As a cadet she wants to please her Founders. She is taught to scorn and fear the humans as a lesser species. She must inhabit a human body to hide in plain sight.
The long-used trope of bodysnatching was interesting to me. What would it really be like to inhabit another’s body and mind, to squat inside and control them? It would be a kind of ultra manipulation; coersion and control but by a naïve systems user. It was also problematic as there’s the issue of consent to consider. In 2024, you can’t just have your protagonist walking about in someone else’s body without permission. So how and when could my alien character Silver learn that this is morally and ethically wrong?
Alongside bodysnatching comes the trope of mass infiltration of a species. From War of the Worlds to The Day of the Triffids to The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the idea of an alien hive mind hijacking human consciousness in a mass takeover bid is ever popular. It is more pertinent than ever with the rise in global populism; shame about past colonisation; the weaponisation of migration by governments and the media; the fear of the stranger on our shores. Jordan Peele’s film, Nope (Not Of Planet Earth) subverts the trope to explore themes of exploitation. Here, the real enemy is not the squidlike alien. Peele told Vanity Fair in 2017 that ‘Humanity is the monster in my films.’
The word ‘alien’ has its roots in the human need to belong. The etymology is the Latin alius, meaning ‘other’, and alienus – ‘belonging to another’. My character Silver believes she needs to fulfil her Founders’ mission to colonise at the start of the story, but through living with humans she learns that she only wants to belong. There’s a psychological phenomenon which means you can’t or won’t care about mass suffering, either through self-protection (it’s too distressing) or through something called compassion fade, a psychic numbing. The minute you start to know and visualise a victim then you start to care. Silver’s skin is special: it unmatters to allow her to cast it over another lifeform and inhabit it, yet by doing so, she has no choice but to connect with the human inside.
As a writer I am always inhabiting characters, which makes body-snatching even more interesting to explore. It’s a paradox because it’s both the ultimate in control and yet to be inside another’s skin is the ultimate in empathy. As Atticus Finch says in To Kill a Mockingbird, ‘You never really understand a person until […] you climb into his skin and walk around in it.’
