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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Nellisir" data-source="post: 3004984" data-attributes="member: 70">Just about everything we view gets anthropomorphized (sp).  Meerkat Manor is popular because the meerkats are treated and explained as tiny, fuzzy, tailed people.It's how it goes.CJ Cherryh has written a number of sci-fi series dealing with alien races, the most prominent being the Chanur saga and the current Foreigner saga.  She puts alot of emphasis on aliens as different, with different values and different ways of understanding.  The atevi, the alien race from the Foreigner books, are tall, humanoid aliens -- apparently sufficiently like us to have sexual relations.  But, unlike humans, they don't feel love, friendship, or affection.  Instead, they feel manchi, a sort of biologically-enforced loyalty to their superior.  Manchi can compel the atevi to do things a human would find distasteful or unthinkable, since the question becomes not what the atevi wants to do, but where his or her manchi lies, and what the person who holds their manchi desires.  Untangling manchi is a major part of atevi politics.If that's difficult to comprehend, then that's the point.  It's not a human way of thinking.</blockquote>