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Message: <blockquote data-quote="S'mon" data-source="post: 953991" data-attributes="member: 463">How little alienness is enough?Culturally, truly alien comlex aliens tend to appear only in literary sf.  The best movie aliens are probably the 'one trick ponies' that embody one particular thing - the parasite Alien, the hunter Predator, etc.For a political story, I can accept aliens that motivation-wise are stand-ins for other cultures, like the Narn and Centauri.What's 'too little' IMO is when almost every alien species seems based off a small subset of modern southern Californian culture - the Star Trek phenomenon.Physically, television sf has always had the problem of limited budgets.  If they can't do aliens that at least look _slightly_ alien, I wish they wouldn't do them at all.  Blake's 7 had almost no 'aliens', but lots of variant human cultures, apparently of Earth origin.  If they look human, calling them 'aliens' achieves nothing in my book - they're human, why not admit it and construct the backstory accordingly?  Either the story is set in the far future, or prehistoric aliens seeded the galaxy with humans, or whatever.  Just don't pretend a human with a crinkle nose is an alien!</blockquote>