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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mallus" data-source="post: 2877981" data-attributes="member: 3887">From what I know about those authors --and I can only speak confidently about Niven-- they routinely cooked up exotic alien physiologies, and left the mindscapes pretty simple and easy to relate to.Niven's famous for his single primary trait aliens (and I don't mean that derisively); Kzin are agressive, Puppeteers cowardly, Pak protective, err, paranoid, etc. There psychologies are easily expressed in human terms. I've only read a little Baxter, but from what I've seen, the psychology of any race, humans included, isn't one of his interests. Does he ever try to write from a photino birds' point-of-view? I'm guessing not.  Then consider a writer like Samuel R. Delany. In Babel-17 a character briefly mentions an alien race whose langauge was based on heat, who could describe an entire diplomatic base's environmental control system accurately enough to build from scratch using only 7 words ("That's impossible" says one character. "Not if you have the right 7 words"). Its the most impressive, and succinct, description of alien an mindset I've read. A perspective Delany couldn't possible write from, only describe in that tangential way.  All of that is psysiology, though, not psychology. Ever read Clement's "Mission of Gravity"? The Mesklynites are a fantastic creation; armored, methane-breathing catepillars able to survive in gravities between 3 and 100G. But the protagonist of the novel was really just a wily free-trader captain, who, personaility-wise, wouldn't have be out-of-place on the South China Seas.Can you come up with any other examples? For a counter-example, I'll site Stanislaw Lem's "Solaris", a book that posits, among other things, that when we try and grapple with the truly alien, all we can see is ourselves.</blockquote>

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