I write science fiction and I was thinking about it the other day and only one of my books features living aliens. A couple have the remains of long-dead alien civilizations, but only one has aliens and those aliens are genetically engineered using DNA from ancient humans taken by the aforementioned long-dead aliens.
AND the long-dead aliens actually evolved on Earth. (It’s complicated.)
The other books have only humans. The reason for this is my firm belief that an actual alien intelligence that evolved on another world would be so different from humans as to lack any common frame of reference other than perhaps certain scientific and mathematical constants. While this might make a good scientific procedural type of SF novel, that’s not my thing so I avoid aliens, especially since I really want to avoid the very obviously human “aliens” that some SF authors try to pass off.
And that’s a reason why I like SF that either doesn’t have aliens at all or doesn’t try to explain their motivations or get inside their head: most authors’ attempts to think like an alien just don’t ring true to me. It’s hard enough trying to think like another intelligent species that I posit evolving on our planet with DNA and the normal bilateral symmetry that vertebrates on Earth have. Trying to think like something that evolved without DNA, without that bilateral symmetry and in an entirely different ecosystem is going to wind up sounding too human.
Agree? Disagree? Do you have an example of an alien from an SF novel that actually seems alien to you, not just in how it’s shaped but in how it thinks?
Yeah, Asimov’s Foundation books are great; he came up with an idea broad enough not to need aliens. Aliens (not susceptible to psychohistory) would pretty much ruin the idea.
But…most writers aren’t Asimovs!
Larry Niven takes it to the other extreme: gobs of aliens! Heaps of 'em! Many of them much more powerful than humanity.
(Heh: Phil Foglio does the same in the “Buck Godot” setting!)
My personal preference is somewhere right in the middle, such as Poul Anderson’s “Dominic Flandry” series of stories and novels. There are aliens – there’s a big “cold war” plot between the human empire and an alien empire – but the stories really are more about humanity than universal abstract intelligence.
Follow-up: in my opinion, the best two “First Contact” novels ever written are “Omega” by Jack McDevitt, and “A Deepness in the Sky” by Vernor Vinge.
These need to be on everyone’s sf shelf! They’re that good.
But…ultimately…the “aliens” in these two books are “people.” We can recognize their emotional states, their needs, their fears. They think the way we think. We can talk to them, and they can talk to us.
This might be the way it would work in reality. It might be that real-world needs compel “thought” into a fairly limited practical schema. Oh, sure, an alien species might differ from us in details. They might be more territorial, or have an estrus cycle, or be more inclined to social cooperation (without actually being a hive mind: just a little more collective.)
But the laws of nature are going to impel minds in certain ways. The laws of conservation are tough that way.
I don’t have a hard preference on with or without but if there are aliens I want a explanation without to many gyrations.
Rubber forehead aliens are fine if the premise is some sort of common seed, not if they are supposed to have evolved completely independently. I can accept some human tendencies as it’s not that difficult to extrapolate from what humans would do. We anthropomorphize animals all the time. Some things are just logical. Eat, procreate, survive.
I do think a good story can come completely not understanding the other point of view though.
This is a lot of the point of Stanislas Lem’s Solaris and of Terry Carr’s short story “The Dance of the Changer and the Three”. Other authors have suggested something similar, even suggesting that human beings in the distant past or far future are so sufficiently different from us as to be incomprehensible (Frederick Pohl, Frank Herbert, and Joe Haldeman, among others).
I’m not sure I agree. I think that we’d be able to communicate even across the vast differences, and even beyond technical agreements over mathematics and physics. Aliens wouldn’t be as psychologically similar as Hal Clement’s aliens (who are fantastically different physically, yet almost entirely identical to humans in their values and the way they think.)
I can’t prove it, of course. But certainly aliens we can interact with are far more interesting and you can make stories involving them, so they will continue to ber used. Once you’ve said that “aliens are so different we CAN’T understand them.” you’ve exhausted your philosophical point, after all, and there’s nothing more to be said. The interesting part is in how we begin to understand them and their way of perceiving the universe.
Of course, I like my SF both with and without aliens. There are plenty of both types, even in sdpace-spanning SF (think Asimov’s Foundation series.)
I like aliens just fine so long as some thought is put into them. This may or may not mean thinking like us. Hal Clements’ aliens, for instance, are basically just like us, except in so far as their differing environments force them to be different: Creatures evolved for hundreds of gravities will naturally have a fear of heights, will consider projectile weapons astounding and nigh-impossible, and will be only an inch or so high with a long, flat body… but a canny and resourceful merchant captain will still be a canny and resourceful merchant captain, regardless of species. On the other hand, some few authors really do do a good job of presenting aliens who “think as well as a man, but not like a man”, and when done well, that can be impressive enough to carry an entire story. It’s only when aliens are written poorly that I think that they detract from a story.
I have no preference; either is fine. I don’t usually write about aliens, but that:s just because I haven"t tried all that often.
But it"s certainly possible to have unknowable aliens. There"s the Terry Carr story CalMeacham mentioned, aw well as Michael Bishop"s :“Death and Designation Among the Asedi” (later novelized as Transfigurations).
I do think communication is possible with alien races; there will be things we have in common: the need for food, at the most basic level, and things like the periodic table when dealing with an advanced race.
I prefer “with”. Just looking at series , the only alien-less SF series in my top 5 is Dune, others all feature aliens prominently - Banks’ Culture, Brin’s Uplift, Cherryh’s Alliance-Union (and Foreigner) and Le Guin’s Hainish Universes.
Yes, I know the Hainish cycle actually is actually all humans, but
a) they’re really altered humans (both the hermaphrodites in Left Hand of Darkness and the small furry natives in The Word For World Is Forest are actually human in origin)
b) “humans” are actually Hainish aliens.
Yeah, gimme aliens. And I like aliens that can communicate with us.
I enjoyed “Edge of Tomorrow”, but I couldn’t relate to the mimics as there was no communication.
I think it’s easier to make a good story without aliens than with them. In general a story works when you can relate to or at least understand the characters and their motivations. Hard to sympathize with aliens unless you give them human psychology and outlooks, in which case you might ask why you’re even bothering since you could just have humans with slightly different cultures. Other than “aliens are cool, dammit!” Which is a solid argument.
Seems to be a spectrum of understanding:
Incomprehensible: These are good for when they’re mysterious, invading, or it’s a horror story. But the closer to this end you make them it can feel like a cheat. Why did they do A? Oh, well, they’re aliens! We don’t gotta explain shit.
The other side, when they’re super relatable, they’re often reappropriated fantasy races – elves/fairy folk, dwarves, orcs, undead, demons, reptile people, space locusts/monsters, etc.
I think aliens could be similar to us due to convergent evolution, but there’s so many environments it’d be unlikely. Communication seems even less likely. We can’t decode every ancient human language. We can’t understand “dumb” terrestrial animals. And they share our same senses, for the most part. How the hell would we talk to a faceless, blind animal that uses echolocation, or talks by excreting chemicals or bio-luminescence or something.
I think aliens would work best for me when they’re used as kind of background to the main story. Like, we know there are intelligent aliens out there but they breathe methane and see by echolocation and we can’t really talk to them and don’t generally interact with them at all. We’ve worked out that they have access to the space-based resources in certain systems and we have it in others and otherwise they’re just there, in the background doing their own thing.
I’m happy with either. I don’t care if human-like aliens are improbable - if I was going to let strict accuracy get in the way of a good story, I’d stick to biographies.
There is a huge advantage in having someone on both sides intelligent and alive enough to recognise and participate in an attempt to establish a line of communication. We also have technology to help bridge the gap where we do not naturally possess the means to communicate by a shared method.
There’s always the ‘humans so different than us, they may as well be aliens’ : Ultras, Conjoiners, and other gene-modified humans in Alastair Reynolds’s Revelation Space setting; Teela Brown and the Pak from Niven; all of the Culture humans that try on radically different forms; etc…
Agree, but the Culture people (the bush-guy in either Matter or Surface Detail, what happens at the end of Excession), and Reynolds’s stuff are one big step further.
Speaking of that, I would just about murder people in their beds to get the Revelation Space universe on the big screen.
Larry and Jerry have had their chances for us to see fithp or puppeteers or kzinti or moties (beyond o.k. cartoons, that is): I want someone else to get a crack at it. Give the keys to Ridley Scott, let Reynolds have final approval, sprinkle Giger outtakes over the whole stew, and I’ll act like a 35 year old housewife watching Titanic again and again.
My favorite SF is the Vorkosiganverse, by Lois McMaster Bujold. No aliens there, although some unusual genetically modified humans, e.g., the Quaddies.
On the other hand, I have read some terrific SF with aliens. Probably my favorite ones are by Vernor Vinge. I also enjoyed Zenna Henderson’s People stories, and the Julian May’s Tanu/Firvulag aliens from her Saga of Pliocene Exile. However, they seem like humans with superpowers, not so different from us otherwise.
Even more they seem like the * aes sídhe* or the Seelie and Unseelie Courts. There’s a fantasy series coated in SF trappings, if ever I saw one. Not that that’s a bad thing, I love that series.
RikWriter: I’ve read a lot of good science fiction without aliens – Asimov’s *Foundation Trilogy *for example – and I’ve read a lot of good science fiction with aliens. If the story’s good I don’t care whether it uses aliens or not.
As an example of a creature that thinks differently than humans, I would submit the tripartite beings of Dido in Poul Anderson’s The Rebel Worlds. (They are mentioned in other novels.)
Anderson, I think, does the best job of creating aliens: Aycharchaych from the Flandry series, the Ice People of “A Message in Secret,” Au from “The Game of Glory,” Smokesmith from “The Pirate,” the Mersians from several works, and above all the Ythrians, the most fully realized alien species in all sci fi.
Heinlein also created some interesting aliens, The Star Beast and the Medusa-like ambassador from the novel of the same name, the Dragons of Between Planets, and the Martians of several novels, including Double Star.