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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5141921" data-attributes="member: 4937">Other than biologically?  Probably not, or to the extent that there is, it would be cultural differences driven by biology.I don't agree with that at all.Just a few examples:1) A race with racial memory that is born 'knowing'.2) A race with lamarkian evolution.3) A race where individuals were super-organisms of cooperative individuals.  4) A race with highly distinct physical castes where the individual members are so wildly different that we would not recognize them as members of the same species on the basis of phenotype.5) A race with a set of emotional states which were alien to our own.  You mention one kind, in a rather extreme case, but less extreme possibilities are available.  Imagine races where one major human emotion: compassion, desire, anger, fear, etc. is missing, or try to imagine an emotional state existing which has no correspondence with human emotional states.  Or try to imagine emotional associations that are very different than humans, for example a race that when wrong makes no assumption that its entitled to retribution or compensation and has no corresponding emotional states.6) A race of clones.7) Wildly different sexuality than humans, for example, one gender, natural ratio of males to females very far from 1:1, spawning behavior, mate and die behavior, sexuality is a associated with children and adults grow out of it, etc.  That is, no families as we know it and possibly no heirarchies as we know them, and no assumption that life progresses in the stages we assume are natural.8) A race that experience wildly different life cycles from humanity, such as naturally immortal or coming to physical maturity in two years or two hundred, long periods of hibernation, etc.I would say all aliens serve the literary purpose of exploring a particular facet of humanity, but that they serve this purpose best when in that facet they are quite alien to our experience as humans.</blockquote>

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