A little more detail on my project involving 'hypotheticals'.

These are letters between a human on Earth and an alien writing to Earth. The letters are written in Chinese and English and they don't necessarily communicate very well, but they at least deal roughly with the same topics or themes, and so they progress, but in an awkward way – with lots of things unknown.

The fact is that at the time these letters are being written it has become necessary for every human to communicate with an alien in this way. I will explain more about this later.

The alien is writing hypotheticals. Each hypothetical is an attempt to imagine an aspect of the thinking and/or the daily life of the other. It is a kind of thinking out loud about what the other world (our world) is like.

The human is writing descriptions of characters and observations of daily life, in the hope that the alien can get a picture of the world from this writing.

But humans and aliens have different reasons/needs for communicating with each other.

The human writes in haibun form. The alien writes just poems.

The alien's text is translated into English, by a machine (the only available method). The human writes in Chinese. Although in the book I plan these texts won't be translated (i.e there will be no English translation of the Chinese text and no Chinese translation of the English text), I will provide you with translations here so that you know what is being written.