I’ve been reading L. Sprague de Camp’s The Hand of Zei, and the cover depicts an alien two-trunked elephant being used in place of a locomotive on the low-tech world of Krishna. The 1982 cover depicts something that actually occurs in the book:
This made me recall that Larry Niven and Jerry Pournbelle had created a race of invading two-trunked elephant-like valiens, the Fithp, for Footfall
Also, the Slongorn, one of the alien races in Jack Chalker’s well World series, look like red elephants with two trunks 9but no arms/front legs).
What is it with SF writers and two-trunked elephants? Is this one of those cases where this is just a subtle variation on the Earthly original, just different enough to scream “Alien!” without seeming too outre? Are there any other examples? I was surprised to find that there has been at least one real-life two-trunked elepant, whose stuffede head is preserved at the Ripley’e Believe-it-or-Not “Odditorium” in San Antonio:
Strange. However a more fruitful field of enquiry might be to find out the proportion of 1970s-'80s SF cover-art illustrators were habitual users of illegal drugs.
Especially for paperbacks; and especially for Moorcock.
I’ve long thought it has a lot to do with elephants on occasion being used as an example of real-world non-human animals with a manipulative appendage. Two trunks are simply an upgrade designed to make them more competitive in dexterity.
Invaders from Rigel had elephantlike aliens, but I don’t recall how many trunks they had.
I think that it starts with the (normal, Earthly) elephant as a case study. How weird can aliens be? At least as weird as Earthly life. How weird, then, can Earthly life be? Well, we’ve got a relatively intelligent species that uses a prehensile nose as a fingered tentacle… That’s pretty weird. As a thought exercise, it’s meant to just show how far outside the box you can go, but some authors take it a bit too literally, and go not just that far out of the box, but also in that exact same direction. One might be just as justified in, say, making a species with prehensile ears… but nobody ever seems to do that.
Oh, and it should also be mentioned that Niven and Pournelle’s Fithp are apparently descended from actual Earthly elephants, so there’s good reason for them to look like them. One supposes that the Predecessors decided that primates were already on the right track for intelligence, and so decided to uplift the second-best prospect on the planet.
I read that book recently. The Pavuleans have digits of some sort at the end of each trunk, too. Kind of an odd civilization. Kind of an odd book, in fact.
Wait, what? Really? I thought little was known about the Predecessors, at least within Footfall’s covers. Did N&P write a prequel short story or something that I missed?
Bit of a stretch probably, but Niven’s Puppeteers are also not a million miles away from two-trunked elephants - OK, they have two heads, but the brain is central and singular, so the two necks/heads/sense clusters are really just prehensile appendages.
No, within the book, it just takes a bit of extrapolation. There’s a thuktun they show the humans which shows their recent evolutionary path, and the proto-fithp is described as looking exactly like an elephant (larger, only one trunk, etc.). Combine that with a known starfaring race that’s taken an interest in the Fithps’ development, and the implication is clear.
Another SF example: Cameron Jack and the Key to the Universe by Chris Jones (2010)
Mr. Jones desperately needs an editor, not to mention some lessons in grammar. I had to clean up too many errors in that brief excerpt, including changing “worrier” to “warrior”. At least I hope that was what he really meant.
Wallace Stevens used to make up stories about imaginary beasts, according to Wallace Stevens: a Reader’s guide, including an elephant with two trunk: “One tenor, one bass.” (p. 4)
