How alien should aliens be?

[Mallus]

Or, put another way, what is the role of The Alien, the Big Other, in fantasy and science fiction {books, films, TV shows, games --though I'm going to post a gaming-specific version of this in the general forum as well}.

It looks like there is something of a consensus that nonhumans should be something other than "humans in funny suits/with pointy ears/in need of a little cosmetic surgery around the nose area". But exactly what does that mean? If that's the goal, how attainable is it? Practically speaking, how desirable?

I started thinking about this after seeing the issue addressed, in one way or another, in various threads. Mainly in the discussion about leaving the archetypal fantasy races archetypal. A number of people thought that by varying the classic portrayals of different fantasy races you lost their distinctiveness, reduced them to the aforementioned "humans with pointy ears" or "humans in elf-drag". Well, my take on this is "weren't they always that?".

I guess the general form of this question is: to what use do you put aliens/elves/robot detectives? I realize this is going to vary alot depending on the medium.

I keep coming back to the idea that a truly successful portrayal of an alien would represent an artistic failure. You'd wind up with a character that by very definition the reader/viewer couldn't relate to, one that didn't reveal anything about the human condition. Now you could create aliens that merely served as foils to their human counterparts, but then you wouldn't really have an internally consistent alien psychology, just a series of inversions, kinda like the portryal of the Perisans in classic Greek drama {where the Greek playwrights could care less about actual Persian culture, their only purpose was to showcase Greek cultural values.}

When I think about the classic alien characters from SF/F, all I find are humans in funny suits, with very human values and qualities {don't we usually use the alien to say nice things about ourselves? Either by embodiment or contrast.}. We have races based on single, exaggerated human traits {like the Vulcans, Ferengi, and Kzin}, or races based around historical human cultures, like B5's Centauri. Or we have effete, neurotic British man-servent robots toddling around a galaxy far far away, and super-white, super-thin, semi-divine Elves in countless Middle Earths, languidly hefting The Really White Mans Burden... I think characters like Spock, Data, Londo, G'Kar and C3PO work precisely because they aren't alien at all, just faux-exotic enough not to look like the characters in everyday life.

I've drawn a lot of examples from TV and film, but written SF is just as bad {or good}. Hal Clemet wrote of a likable plucky high-seas trader who happens to be a centipede on a disk-shaped planet the size of Jupiter whose polar surface gravity exceeds 200G's. HAL 9000 has a nervous breakdown and later wonders about life after death.

Boy I'm rambling. Maybe its time to summarize.

1) The aliens in SF/F aren't usually very alien.
2) This is a good thing.
3) Because really, we are only ever really telling stories about ourselves.
4) There are some works that try to address the very alien, but they're the exception, and not the rule. Or the goal.
5) While the depiction of the alien may run the gamut from highly stylish to wildly immaginative to wholell allegorical/metaphoric, the characters underneath, will have to be recognizably human for the audience to relate to {and find value} in them.

Well, I'm done. What to you all think? Who are your favorite non-humans and how not-human are they?

 

[ColonelHardisson]

I guess you sort of asked and answered most of your own questions, which are, essentially, the ones that have been debated about this issue. It's true that most aliens in SF&F are human to some degree. That's by necessity, since it's really impossible for us to have any inkling of what a non-human intelligence would really be like. It's along the lines of trying to imagine anything that exists in more than the 3 spacial dimensions we're used to; our brains simply aren't wired to work that way, so it's impossible to do it. Therefore, aliens and non-human fantasy intelligences are often invested with one or more distinctly human traits that are exaggerated to appear as "not human." Clifford Pickover has a good book about this subject that's worth reading.

I generally dislike the "humans in funny suits" type of aliens that populate the galaxies of so many scifi franchises. Star Trek attempted to provide a rationale behind this, but it's still tiresome. I'd like to see some attempt on the part of the writers or writers to make their creatures truly alien. However, there are some of these "humans in funny suits" that are intriguing, since they are used to explore interesting aspects of the human condition. The Centauri, Narn, and Minbari of B5 are good examples. The Vulcans of Trek are another. Larry Niven's Ringworld books explore a vast world of species all descended from the same root stock as humans, and which evolved to fill all available ecological niches. Still, all the foregoing "aliens" I would say range from 70-90% human.

Niven also has a few more unusual aliens that range farther afield. Pierson's Puppeteers are a good example. They are strange enough to begin to feel truly alien in nature, but still share some common ground with humans. This common ground would have to exist with any real aliens we ever run across for us to be able to deal with them at all. Anyway, I'd say the Puppeteers are 40-50% human.

Doc Smith had some of the most enigmatic aliens in his Lensmen books. Many of them were truly bizarre, with strange or unknowable motives and outlooks. Doc probably purposely went out of his way to make them outlandish to appeal to a pulp audience, and likely gave little real thought to what made them tick. This adds to their strangeness. I'd say any given alien from Doc's work is 30-60% human. Some may range higher, some may range lower. He does have a few on the low end of the scale.

Perhaps the most truly alien creatures that I know of in literature come from H.P. Lovecraft. The "gods" of the Cthulhu mythos are, in fact, massively powerful aliens. Cthulhu, Hastur, Nyarlathotep,
Azathoth, and the rest are generally pretty dadgum alien. The less powerful aliens he wrote about were also very alien, such as the Mi-Go, the Elder Things, and the Shoggoth. They were so strange that trying to make sense of them could give one a headache. I'd say they range, collectively, as being 10-40% human, with 40% being the far upper limit for only a few, such as (maybe) Nyarlathotep or the Deep Ones.

 

[Mallus]

Therefore, aliens and non-human fantasy intelligences are often invested with one or more distinctly human traits that are exaggerated to appear as "not human." Clifford Pickover has a good book about this subject that's worth reading.

Thanks, I'll check that out.

Niven also has a few more unusual aliens that range farther afield.

I like Niven's aliens. I think he was very smart in creating races that had a single overriding trait, a "hook" if you will, that made them immediately distinct in the readers' minds. To paraphrase an old proffesor of mine, he "gave whole races a limp". I think that kind of self-stereotyping has a place in SF/F, since the task of presenting a whole deveoped well-rounded alien race/society is so difficult. Start with something instantly recognizable, then work outwards from there.

Perhaps the most truly alien creatures that I know of in literature come from H.P. Lovecraft.

Lovecraft's fertile imagination certainly produced a slew of odd creatures, but where any of them ever characters? I think you can categorize all of Lovecraft's alien entities as baroque primary-process anxieties; the fear that the unknown {and unknowable} was malevolent. A more elaborate kind of bogeyman... well, a bogeyman that existed in hypergeometries, was covered in tentacles, and hailed from the outermost reaches of space...

 

[Shadowdancer]

This is one of the reasons I like the Traveller role-playing game/universe. There are some really alien aliens in it. Among the major races, the K'kree (militant herbivores) and the Hivers (enigmatic manipulators) are wonderful changes of pace from the usual sci-fi aliens.

 

[S'mon]

I think an alien can be un-humanlike and still relatable to in that any living thing will have certain common traits, such as a desire and ability to reproduce itself - everything wants food, sex, a comfortable environment, etc. The most interesting aliens to me tend to be high-concept, like the Pack in Vinge's Fire Upon the Deep - group-mind sentient canines with a complex medieval society. The worst aliens for me are Trek's throwaway race of the week who are white Californians with crinkly noses and some uninteresting social issue for the main cast to solve.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

My not very helpful answer is:
Alien should be as alien they are needed for your story - and what you can afford.

If you need an alien to tell a story about a real world conflict, but don`t want anybody be offended, you can just take humans and add bumps on their foreheads ...
That is, basically the idea that leads us to Klingons, Bajorans, Vulcans, Centauri, Narn, Minbari.

If you need an alien whose motives cannot be understood, and which is "just" there to cause horror, make it more alien, give it bizare anotomy, and don`t explain to much about its cultere (better nothing at all), so nobody can understand, but everybody fear it..
This is the idea that creates Vorlons, or the Alien itself...

Mustrum Ridcully

 

[Hand of Evil]

There is alien, then there is alien.

One is just looking different but really having the same convictions and principles. This means you can find common understanding and most of the books, TV and movie aliens fall into this group, over all it is more foreign than alien.

The other is being completely alien, there is no common ground, understanding of reasons, principles are unknowable. I really don't think this can be projected to us, we do not have the thought processes in place to understand it, either we will shut down or put it into something we do understand and accepted it.

 

[ColonelHardisson]

Lovecraft's fertile imagination certainly produced a slew of odd creatures, but where any of them ever characters?

They loomed over the stories he wrote, a constant malevolent presence. They didn't have any dialog, of course, but they were definitely characters. The best example of a story in which a portrait of the titular character is drawn by Lovecraft is The Call of Cthulhu. Obviously you don't get details on thoughts and emotions running through Cthulhu's head, but you get a sense of his pure alienness and evil nature.

 

[ColonelHardisson]

This is one of the reasons I like the Traveller role-playing game/universe. There are some really alien aliens in it. Among the major races, the K'kree (militant herbivores) and the Hivers (enigmatic manipulators) are wonderful changes of pace from the usual sci-fi aliens.

GDW seemed to make a special effort to come up with really "alien" aliens. I think their best work was in 2300, with aliens like the strange, violent Kafers (they are only really intelligent when in battle), the Eber (musical remnants of a fallen civilization), and the Pentapods (masters of genetics, they have a really unusual secret origin).

 

[KChagga]

If you want to see some diverse aliens look at the Sector General series by James White. He has some humanish aliens, but mostly weird ones. They even have wildly differing psychologies.
There is one thing that does make them all seem kind of human though. They all live and work at Sector General. Sector General being an enormous multi-environment and multi-species space hospital. Everyone there is trying to help and cure people, er um things. It would be the safest place to be in all of Scifi.