'A sure sign of life on other planets would be if someone from one of those planets finally got their act together and started writing a poem. Say, for example, someone from the planet Thermador, where (we would then discover) poetry is composed in the trillions of small nuclei of a poet’s hypothalamus and transmitted to the individual mind of a reader in an instant, taking the characteristics of what on Earth is called an emotion, a feeling or a thought. Alternatively, we might be lucky enough to go to our local pub one night and find there a reading by a creative writer from Circa, in the Circinus Galaxy, which was originally created by a supernova (the writer seems a little haughty simply because of that – after all, it is quite a thing). Of course, she also is not reading alone, because creative writers from Circa go about composing their work on the skin of their peers, so that each Circadian is (like our two readers) on average 15 feet in height and 9 feet in width, and is both the blank sheet and also the walking books of those around them. To us, such Circadian creative writing is called tattooing, or a medical skin condition known here on Earth as dermatographia urticaria, or it refers to the dark history of skin writing that has accompanied some of the horrific human acts of war and prejudice. But, of course, these Circadians we are currently watching are not from around here, so such comparisons are laboured.' (Graeme Harper, Creative writing on other planets, Editorial introduction)
