Fun Fact #5: Flortians – The Real ‘Little Green Men’

Good morning, friends and fans!

Today in Fun Facts, a series of articles about characters and plot devices in my stories, I’ll be talking about Flortians.

Flor-whatians??

Flortians – as in people from Flort – a a small planet inhabited by humanoids roughly at about the same level of development as Earth in the 1950s. To Terrans, the Flortians resemble the ‘little green men’ they know from old fashioned cartoons, and this makes any dealings with them extremely complicated – because Flortians are unbelievably bad-tempered, warlike little beings who didn’t like being laughed at after every other sentence.

To make matters even worse, the two largest tribes on Flort – the Idet and the Soluut, are almost always in a state of war with each other. Mainly, the causes of these frequent wars are fairly simple to explain – neither tribe likes the other, and neither would like other to gain any kind of advantage, which implies a certain jealousy and also a great deal of difficulty and frustration for any envoys sent to negotiate with Flort. The two tribes simply don’t get on at all.

The Idet are known – erm, Flort-wide – as proud, fearsome warriors, while the Soluut have a reputation as cattle-stealing, back-stabbing cowards who would make you run your legs off chasing them, then turn back and gut you when you had run out of steam. A state of genocidal all-out war has existed between them for centuries. The Idet all seem to be shorter and dumpier, and the Soluut all seemed to thinner and slightly taller than the Idet. There are clear differences between them, and not just in physical build and appearance, but also in terms of culture and technology. The warlike Idet carry shields, swords, axes, spears and armor, while the allegedly peaceful Soluut wear no armor and seem to be using some kind of technology involving muskets, compressed air and metal projectiles.

If you would like to see how the Terran Empire’s first diplomatic interaction with the Flort went, feel free to read “Little Green Men” – you can find it in “Space Sucks!“.

Feel free to email or message me if you have any comments or questions!