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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5037774" data-attributes="member: 4937">I disagree entirely.  What you get when you create an alien that is a character is something that is a fraction of a person and at the same time some fraction which is utterly inexplicable in some cases perhaps even to the author.  It is a very modern view of the world that the actions of another actor should be comprehensible and understandable to the observer.  Remember, we are talking about a world made of myth, and to the writers of the myths, the world was inexplicable.  They couldn't look at the world and explain why it was.  We can look at the world and say where the rain comes from and why the wind blows and why the sun shines.   The writers of the myths used the myths to try to explain the utter incomprehensibility of these things, and so they created the concept that the wind, rain, and sun were alien beings with mental processes that were on some level inexplicable.  The best you could hope for was to partly understand them: to be able to relate to them on some incomplete but functional level. If you read alot of fairy tales, and I mean old fairy tales, not modern fairy tales or even 18th century literary fairy tales, over and over again you'll read about fey creatures acting according to a logic that is inexplicable.  You can't come up with a reason for why fey act the way that they do.  They have fey logic, fey reasoning, and fey culture.  You aren't supposed to understand them.  That's the point.  The best you can do is learn enough about it to have a better chance against them than the ignorant, but there is no comprehensible why - only what and how.Many of the monsters are literally personifications of forces of nature.  Nature was inexplicable, cruel, incomprehensible and uncontrollable.  The personifications of it were of necessity to alien to understand, motivated by desires quite foreign to human desires.  They are only partially anthromorphic.With a few exceptions, modern authors do a very bad job of this.  HP Lovecraft gets it.  'The Alien Way' by Gordon R. Dickenson is one of the few sci-fi books I can think of that really gets it.  His aliens aren't people with bumps on their head.  Their alien.  He doesn't try to teach in his story, 'Underneath the skin, we are all basically alike', which has a kernal of truth if we are talking about people, but is amazingly stupid when applied to something that isn't.We very rapidly approaching a time in human history when it will become essential to understand that everything that is a character isn't human.  As we begin to have the power to create non-human intelligences, it is arguably essential to human survival that we get away from the notion that intelligent implies human.</blockquote>

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