# Sci-Fi: How ARE The ALIENS Mostly Portrayed? **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [March 24, 2004, 2:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sci-fi-how-are-the-aliens-mostly-portrayed/236130 "2004-03-24T14:35:29Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 16\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![ralph124c](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/8797f3/32.png) [@ralph124c](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ralph124c)\ **Post date:** [March 24, 2004, 2:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sci-fi-how-are-the-aliens-mostly-portrayed/236130/1 "2004-03-24T14:35:29Z")
Science fiction has dealt with the issue of humanity encountering intelligent life, in various ways. Early sci-fi (likeJules Verne) almost never discusses the possibility of encountering extra-terrestrial (intelligent life). I think one of the earliest portrayals is H.G. Wells “WAR OF THE WORLDS”-where the Martians regard humans aspotenial slaves. Given that Wells was actually writing a parody of British imperilaism, his thinking about the subject was strongly political. Later on, we see the aliens portrayed as essentially benevolent and helpfulto humans (as in “THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL”). What do most contemporary Sci-Fi writers thing of the aliens? Are they likely to regard humanity as a large cattle ranch? ---
**Author:** ![El\_Elvis\_Rojo](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/898d66/32.png) [@El\_Elvis\_Rojo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/El_Elvis_Rojo)\ **Post date:** [March 24, 2004, 4:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sci-fi-how-are-the-aliens-mostly-portrayed/236130/2 "2004-03-24T16:20:57Z")
Most direct to video movies tend to deal with aliens as vicious evil monsters that just kill pretty much everything. Lots of non-direct to video movies do the same (anyone else excited about **Alien vs Predator**? I kid). In television, there’s still a good mix, so I guess a lot depends on your medium. _X-Files_ is probably the best example, because it lasted so long and dealt with the subject matter a lot. Of course, I missed the last season, so I’m not all too up to date on how they treated them, but from what I recall, there were two schools of thought amongst the aliens: One, that humans would make great slaves and that our planet could be pilliaged for it’s natural resources (much like **War of the Worlds** and **Independance Day** ); the second, that these aliens were assholes, and that humanity could act better as an ally, but was so unimportant that they’d rather just bump us off when any of us found out about them. _Dark Skies_ and _Taken_ had much the same idea. Super smart aliens don’t really see humans as anything other than guinny pigs for experimentation (although, it could often be to help better the universe all-round…who knows). Still, for movie fare, they’re evil, bloodthirsty things, often mindless, but when they do have intelligence, it’s superior to our’s technologically, but luckily the human spirit will always prevail (except in _Invasion of the Body Snatchers_) ---
**Author:** ![RealityChuck](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/realitychuck/32/195_2.png) [@RealityChuck](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RealityChuck)\ **Post date:** [March 24, 2004, 5:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sci-fi-how-are-the-aliens-mostly-portrayed/236130/3 "2004-03-24T17:02:59Z")
Movies tend to give two models for aliens: 1. Evil killers (e.g., Independence Day, Invasion of the Body Snatcher) 2. Good, sometimes almost godly, creatures (e.g., E.T., Starman). Sometimes they seem to be #2, but turn out to be #1 (e.g., “To Serve Man”). #1 is more common, though. There are occasional departures from these two models. **Men in Black** was one of the few where aliens were mostly just plain regular beings, some good, some bad, some in between. There’s also **It Came from Outer Space**. In the literature (at least, in modern versions) aliens are portrayed as being _different_ from us. They think differently and have different customs, but are neither good nor evil, per se. It’s often an issue of misunderstanding, and in some cases, the aliens’ behavior is just plain unexplainable in human terms (e.g., “The Dance of the Changer and the Three,” “The Funeral March of the Marionettes”) ---
**Author:** ![Winston\_Bongo](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/a9adbd/32.png) [@Winston\_Bongo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Winston_Bongo)\ **Post date:** [March 24, 2004, 5:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sci-fi-how-are-the-aliens-mostly-portrayed/236130/4 "2004-03-24T17:13:39Z")
And let’s not forget the Golden Rule: humanoid aliens _always speak English_. And not just any English, but elevated English – sometimes they even have a British accent. Also, they never use contractions. You’ll never hear an alien say “can’t” when “cannot” will do. They tend to have good posture as well, but this may be because their spines are fused. ---
**Author:** ![msmith537](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/d9b06d/32.png) [@msmith537](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/msmith537)\ **Post date:** [March 24, 2004, 6:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sci-fi-how-are-the-aliens-mostly-portrayed/236130/5 "2004-03-24T18:22:08Z")
> [@Winston Bongo](#): > > And let’s not forget the Golden Rule: humanoid aliens _always speak English_. And not just any English, but elevated English – sometimes they even have a British accent. Also, they never use contractions. You’ll never hear an alien say “can’t” when “cannot” will do. They tend to have good posture as well, but this may be because their spines are fused. SILENCE!!! WE ARE ACTUALLY SPEAKING RYGELLIAN…WHICH BY COINCIDENCE IS EXACTLY THE SAME AS YOUR LANGUAGE. -Kang and Kodos All Sci-Fi aliens seem to take the following forms: -Vaguely humanoid (basically because they are a humaoid actor with makeup and extra appendages and maybe an ass on their forehead) -Vaguely insectile or crustacian (cause bugs look alien anyway) -Composed of energy (gives the effects department an excuse to use Photoshop) All Sci-Fi aliens seem to exhibit one of the following behaviors: -Mindless animal-like predatory (like the Alien) -Noble but violent hunter or warrior (like a Klingon or the Predator) -Super-benevolent (if often judgemental - “our advanced benevolent and peacefull race has judged you hu-mons to be too dangerous to the Universe…so we are going to anihilate your planet”) -Childlike (ET or any other number of aliens that get stuck on Earth) -Any singular human trait magnified to the point of ridiculousness All Sci-Fi aliens live in the following types of societies: -Utopias -Facist, militaristic -Hives Sci-Fi aliens typically have the following powers: -Telepathy -Self righteousness -Any power that will save the day at the last minute Sci-Fi aliens typically have the following weaknesses: -Contractions -Pro-noun-ci-a-tion -Inability to comprehend these feelings you hu-mons call ‘love’. -The ability to work out any situation unless there is a wise-cracking human from across the galaxy and possibly from the past to help out. ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [March 24, 2004, 9:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sci-fi-how-are-the-aliens-mostly-portrayed/236130/6 "2004-03-24T21:25:07Z")
Sigh. Don’t people read anymore? The OP talks about science fiction, starting with Wells, and all the responses are about scifi movies. First, aliens predated Wells. The early moon voyages, like by Cyrano de Bergerac (sp?) almost always had the traveler meeting aliens, since people then didn’t understand why the moon was inhospitable. (Verne did, to his credit.) The Moon Hoax of the early 19th century involved moon creatures also. I don’t think you can generalize about aliens in real sf. They take on a wide variety of roles. They can be substitutes for foreigners, transplanting wars and trade to the stars. They can represent political and philosphical or even religous alternatives. They can be godlike, or comic foils. The thing they usually aren’t is **alien**. John Campbell challenged his writers to show him an alien that didn’t think like a man. The first person to do something like this (before the challenge) was Stanley Weinbaum in _A Martian Odyssey_ which had the first aliens who weren’t humans in drag. In movies, except for rare exceptions like 2001, the other responses sum up the situation nicely. ---
**Author:** ![Miller](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/miller/32/481_2.png) [@Miller](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Miller)\ **Post date:** [March 24, 2004, 10:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sci-fi-how-are-the-aliens-mostly-portrayed/236130/7 "2004-03-24T22:22:47Z")
> [@RealityChuck](#): > > Movies tend to give two models for aliens: > > 1. Evil killers (e.g., Independence Day, Invasion of the Body Snatcher) > > 2. Good, sometimes almost godly, creatures (e.g., E.T., Starman). > > Sometimes they seem to be #2, but turn out to be #1 (e.g., “To Serve Man”). #1 is more common, though. > > There are occasional departures from these two models. **Men in Black** was one of the few where aliens were mostly just plain regular beings, some good, some bad, some in between. I think those “departures” are common enough to warrant a seperate classification. “Aliens as just plain folks” is pretty standard for any space opera: _Star Wars_, _Star Trek_, _Farscape_, _Babylon 5_, and plenty of others feature aliens who are roughly equivalent to the humans in the show, give or take a couple centuries of technological advancement. ---
**Author:** ![Podkayne](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/edb3f5/32.png) [@Podkayne](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Podkayne)\ **Post date:** [March 25, 2004, 12:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sci-fi-how-are-the-aliens-mostly-portrayed/236130/8 "2004-03-25T00:44:20Z")
Ooh, ooh, how 'bout the aliens-as-artifact-leavers? The advanced race who either leave stuff for us to find, or whose leftover junk we happen to muddle across. _2001_ by Arthur C. Clarke has the aliens that leave the monoliths to occasionally meddle with our evolution. Clarke’s _Rendezvous with Rama_ has the mysterious spacecraft built by mysterious aliens for mysterious purposes. And Sagan’s _Contact_ has the somewhat meddlesome aliens beaming stuff at us, but also the ancient aliens who created the wormhole subway system. ---
**Author:** ![Volta](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/v/ce73a5/32.png) [@Volta](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Volta)\ **Post date:** [March 25, 2004, 1:54am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sci-fi-how-are-the-aliens-mostly-portrayed/236130/9 "2004-03-25T01:54:24Z")
Just got done reading _Revelation Space_ and _Chasm City_ by Alastair Reynolds who’s a relatively new addition to the sci-fi arena. In his universe, there are some of the most creative aliens you’ll probably find anywhere. _SPOILERS_, I guess Amarantin: Vaguely a cross of bird and human. They have birdlike skulls and remnants of wings on a somewhat humanoid frame. Like humans, they have a strong social need though theirs is somewhat more extreme. They’ll go insane if isolated from the group. They build cities and are capable of building some fantastic and enormous structures, though, for the most part they live in villages. Their planet was roughly Earthlike until they went extinct, and this extinction happened long before humans arrived. Humans and Amarantin can interact to some extent since their brains are relatively similar, but unaided communication will lead humans to insanity. One Amarantin tried to communicate with humans through human language, and, while he controlled them somewhat with fear, he could not comprehend the subtleties of human behavior, such as deception. Pattern Jugglers: Pattern Jugglers resemble floating mats of algae, and somehow they travel to (seed?) water worlds. No one knows their origins, whether they are multiple organisms forming a culture or one vast consciousness, or whether they are intelligent. Most knowledge about them has been learned from humans who dive into Juggler oceans. Divers report feeling their consciousness expanding throughout the ocean, while learning little about the Jugglers, and humans still don’t know whether Jugglers have infiltrated the ocean to the point where the ocean itself is conscious. They apparently have had contact with many alien races and have stored information about these races in their oceanic information nets. By spending enough time in the ocean, humans often have their brains temporarily restructured to alien patterns, especially if the aliens’ brains work similar to human brains. Inhibitors: The dominant survivors of a vast—in both scale and time—galactic conflict called the Dawn War by some races (this a rough translation from several alien languages), the Inhibitors are some type of intelligent machine race, but this is a terrible understatement. The sole reason for calling them machines is to present them in contrast to carbon-based life. They are as vastly superior to machines we think of as advanced as ours are superior to stone tools. As revealed to humans who’ve had their brains restructured to talk with aliens, the Inhibitors see intelligent organic life as a threat to peace, so they crush it and even inhibit it from arising. They send out probes and set traps all designed for this purpose. Over many eons, however, their machinery began to break down, and so humans among other intelligent races, survived. ---
**Author:** ![CairaJade](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/f04885/32.png) [@CairaJade](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CairaJade)\ **Post date:** [March 25, 2004, 6:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sci-fi-how-are-the-aliens-mostly-portrayed/236130/10 "2004-03-25T06:09:36Z")
Humans as slaves? Nah, we’ll make great pets! ---
**Author:** ![Darth\_Nader](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/ad7895/32.png) [@Darth\_Nader](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Darth_Nader)\ **Post date:** [March 25, 2004, 6:24am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sci-fi-how-are-the-aliens-mostly-portrayed/236130/11 "2004-03-25T06:24:57Z")
**ralph124c** , did you forget the **41+**? My favorite aliens are all from Larry Niven’s Known Space future history. they range from anthropomorphic warriors to the telepathic version of a coral reef. Okay, 30 years old, not current. I’ve sort of given up on mainstream science fiction, as the ratio of published work seems to be running about 10:1 “Star Trek/ RPG/ franchise” to “possibly worth reading.” And I used to _like_ the ST books. ---
**Author:** ![CalMeacham](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/calmeacham/32/35_2.png) [@CalMeacham](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CalMeacham)\ **Post date:** [March 25, 2004, 1:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sci-fi-how-are-the-aliens-mostly-portrayed/236130/12 "2004-03-25T13:47:44Z")
In SF literature aliens are treated with quite a bit of sophistication – after all, there is over a century of previous examples, and people don’t want to be accused of following stereotypes. Aliens can still be benificent or destroyers, but now there are _reasons_ for it. Aliens are credited with being socities in their own right, with their own agendas. So you also have aliens that are oblivious the earth people, aliens who “use” humanity in Machiavellian power struggles, Apollonian keepers of knowledge, ruthless space traders, and the simply incomprehensible, among others. Aliens in movies are more stereotyped, partly because the time constraints of movies and the broad appeal required often won;t allow time for subtlety, so aliens tend to fall into one of a few basic types. A lot of aliens used to be ones who took over human forms, in part because of the horror of depersonalization, but also because you didn’t need elaborate special effects to portray them and, most importantly, so you could relate to the alien as a person – it’s hard to do that with a puppet. Now with better puppet technology and CGI it’s possible to have non-human aliens (E.T., Star Wars characters), but aliens still tend to be people with irregular bumps on them or surprisingly humanoid shapes. Why? Partly cost, again (people with latex appliences are cheaper than CGI), but again, so you can relate to them – actors rely on their faces to convey feeling and emotion, so taking that away from them is handicapping them enormously. So you end up with people with weird forehead bumps instead of rod puppets. I’m still amazed that Star Trek let Geordi laFarge operate without his eyes showing for so long. LeVar Burton was amazingly tolerant as an actor to let them deprive him of his expressive eyes for so long. In other words, although there have been exceptions (Yoda, that guy in FarScape), don’t look for too many puppets in SF TV or movies, and don’t look for any of Hal Clement’s characters soon. ---
**Author:** ![DesertDog](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/desertdog/32/11503_2.png) [@DesertDog](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DesertDog)\ **Post date:** [March 25, 2004, 6:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sci-fi-how-are-the-aliens-mostly-portrayed/236130/13 "2004-03-25T18:18:40Z")
I wish I could remember the story’s name or the author, but I remember vividly a short story I read over thirty years ago. About a half-dozen humans were captured by aliens and taken on their ship, which seemed to be a collecting ship. They were kept in a largish cell and treated with benign neglect – food and water regularly but no anal probes. After a week or two of this the captives got bored and capured a small but relatively cute alien vermin that was in the cell with them, and popped it into a cage they’d cobbled out of sticks and string. With a couple hours they were freed and their captors apologized, saying that they would be returned to Earth. “We didn’t realize you were intelligent,” they explained. “What made you realize?” they asked. The aliens looked kind of uncomfortable. “It was when you put something in a cage.” DD ---
**Author:** ![Evil\_Captor](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/f17d59/32.png) [@Evil\_Captor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Evil_Captor)\ **Post date:** [March 25, 2004, 7:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sci-fi-how-are-the-aliens-mostly-portrayed/236130/14 "2004-03-25T19:15:58Z")
CJ Cherryh has created a whole range of aliens, from aliens that are “just folks” – almost, to aliens whose thinking is so different from humans and other races that it’s impossible to communicate with them … you just sorta wave as their ships fly past and hope they don’t try to kill you for some unfathomable reason. Hal Clement is notable for some of the memorably alien aliens he has created. And I always found A. E. Van Vogt’s killer aliens – called “the Rill” or something like that – to be notably alien yet distinct creatures in their own right – they weren’t just boogie monsters. The Forerunner aliens from several of Andre Norton’s novels were interestingly alien – just looking at their script could drive you mad from the sheer alienness of it. but they weren’t simple boogie monsters like Lovecraft’s aliens that also could drive people mad – her Forerunners were just … alien. ---
**Author:** ![Evil\_Captor](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/f17d59/32.png) [@Evil\_Captor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Evil_Captor)\ **Post date:** [March 25, 2004, 7:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sci-fi-how-are-the-aliens-mostly-portrayed/236130/15 "2004-03-25T19:19:21Z")
> [@Darth Nader](#): > > **ralph124c** , did you forget the **41+**? > My favorite aliens are all from Larry Niven’s Known Space future history. they range from anthropomorphic warriors to the telepathic version of a coral reef. Oh, yah. The Pierson’s Puppeteers. Fun bunch. Cute at first, but frightening once you start to understand them. And the telepathic group mind “dog packs” from Vernor Vinge’s “A Light Upon The Deep” were very nicely alien, too. ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [March 25, 2004, 8:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sci-fi-how-are-the-aliens-mostly-portrayed/236130/16 "2004-03-25T20:24:09Z")
> [@Darth Nader](#): > > And I used to _like_ the ST books. I did too. And then James Blish died.