The Anne Rice Vampires Aren't Aliens: A Summary
Occasionally I see people say that Anne Rice revealed in lore in a later book that the vampires are actually aliens. This isn't true, it's not what that book says, and the book pretty obviously doesn't say this. Anne Rice also clarified this on Facebook:
Spoiler Alert Maybe ---- Regarding "Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis," unfortunately some people who apparently did not read the book closely, or did not finish it, or only heard about it --- came to the conclusion that the vampires are descended from aliens from outer space. This is not so at all. --- Amel, the spirit who fused with Akasha to create the first vampire, does indeed have a back story in the novel. But he is not an alien from outer space. And the story of who he was and how his spirit managed to infuse a tribe of connected vampires has to do with his own ingenuity and how that ingenuity infused his ghost or spirit making of him a unique being.
Amel is not an alien, he's also not a Replimoid, an extra-terrestrial artificially engineered being. You may have missed this if you bailed on the book before finishing it, because of the part where the aliens say that Amel is a replimoid:
This being, Amel, was the most powerful and versatile Replimoid we’ve ever made.
Which is a setup for the big scene where Amel reveals that the aliens are liars, because he's not a Replimoid:
“So they didn’t make you,” I said. “You’re not a Replimoid.”
“No, I’m not,” he said. “But I am apparently the first human being they ever forcibly and stealthily and immorally removed from this planet. And what I became in their hands is the enhanced creature you see before you, ever resilient and self-renewing, and seemingly immortal.” Once again, his face was flushed, and he was clearly angry.
This clarification is not hard to miss, because he goes on to give a big speech about Not Being a Replimoid:
“Understand this,” he repeated. “Everything good in me came from my birth as a human being, my childhood among human beings, my parents on Earth, my teachers on Earth, the wise and the kind of my village, the children brave enough to befriend me and pity me—and not so much from the superstitious and fearful notions of my tribe, but from the underlying morality of the tribe!” ”
Why, if you don't know or don't remember what happens in The Queen of the Damned, does it matter to whether the vampires are aliens whether Amel is an alien?
From Blood Genesis, the lore explainer at the beginning of Prince Lestat:
Amel, the furious familiar spirit of the witch Mekare, sought to punish the Queen.
When she lay dying, stabbed over and over by conspirators of her own court, this spirit Amel entered into her, fusing with her body and her blood and giving her a new and terrifying vitality.
This fusion caused a new entity to be born into the world: the vampire, the blood drinker.
The additional context we get of this in The Alien Book is that Amel was once a human, and he has special spirit powers because his ghost was fused with the organic polymer luracastria, which he invented, and which, for what it's worth, is based on elements developed by aliens, but all the elements of it are from Earth. Luracastria is terrestrial. I can't go further into it, or we'll be here all day. Luracastria is terrestrial. How are you going to pretend you know Anne Rice vampire lore if you can't even explain luracastria and how it's terrestrial?! Luracastria posers out there, there's too many, my god, catch up with the utopian society of Atalantaya, you're like fourteen thousand years too late.
Anyway, this is how that works out for the vampires:
And so is this what is happening to us, that this subatomic luracastria is slowly invading and transforming every cell in our bodies while those cells retain their self-replicating nature and we are slowly becoming luracastria?
Vampires were, are, and were never retconned to be anything other than the fusion of the ancient spirit Amel with the body of the dying Queen Akasha.
Amel was originally a spirit of unknown origin, in The Alien Book we learn his origin, which is that he was human.
Amel, the spirit at the core of vampirism, is not an alien.
The vampires aren't aliens.
Vampires might be made of luracastria.
Luracastria is not alien either.
If I have to read the words, "man, the series really jumped the shark when she revealed the vampires were aliens!" one more time, I am going to turn into luracastria.
blakekathryn
tangentwithtanner
