So, as usual, I’ll be at Archon this year — it’s the only SF convention that’s so close I can drive back and forth. I most particularly don’t want to put my mother in the position of feeling she should take care of my dogs or stay overnight at my house — she is getting a bit frail for that — so coming over to let the dogs out, sure, but anything more than that, not really. Therefore, I took myself off the schedule for evening events, with the expectation that I will definitely come home each evening and drive back up to Collinsville each morning.
I do like Archon. It’s generally well run, by people who have been doing it a long time and have the process down. It’s not a big convention, but the costumer’s guild in St Louis is apparently top-notch, because Archon usually has a fantastic masquerade, which alas, I will be skipping because I will be on my way home before that.
Anyway, looks like one panel on Friday and the rest on Saturday.
Here’s the first panel:
Alien Species That Make Sense 4 Oct 2024, Friday 14:00 – 15:00 — How do you create alien species that make sense to the readers? Not doing so will create gigantic plot holes, so learn how to avoid this!
I mostly disagree with the idea that fictional alien species need to make sense. I do, however, agree, that alien species should make sense TO THE READER or FOR THE STORY.
For a subset of SF novels, the aliens ought indeed to make sense, and by “make sense” in this context, I mean they should make anatomical, behavioral, ecological, and evolutionary sense, and they should not be clones of humans in any of those realms. If you’ve got an arthropod-like species that’s rather like a giant mollusk — and if you do, then you need to either ignore or explain why the exoskeleton is not too heavy, because, spoiler, it’s going to be too heavy — but if you do have this species, then it is just stupid to make it psychologically and behaviorally and socially just like shelled humans with pincers.
The giant mollusk should not be psychologically just like a human because that’s nuts.
Unless you’re writing a farce or something and then, sure, the giant mollusk can in fact have a personality cloned from Conan the Barbarian or whatever the author wants. That’s why the needs of the story trump everything else.
I think there are basically the following categories of aliens in SF:
A) Aliens that are really humans; ie, if you are writing something called “The Alien’s Mail-Order Bride,” then probably your aliens are going to be very, very human. Very. This is not at all plausible (obviously), but creating plausible aliens is not only not the point of the story, it’s totally antithetical to the point of the story. Other examples in this general vicinity:
— Ascending (Vardeshi Saga), Pechenick. I don’t care that the aliens are basically just like humans except much more gorgeous and stronger and faster. Yes, they might as well be vampires or something. No, they are not at all plausible. This story is deliberately getting as close as possible to The Alien’s Mail-Order Bride without (quite) descending into B-movie territory. I will just mention here that although I liked things about the story, I found the high level of character stupidity almost unendurable. In fact, it was literally unendurable and I DNF the book
— Cuckoo’s Egg, Cherryh. This is a very different example, which is why I picked it. Here, the author is not skirting B-movie territory at all. The author is saying something thematically important, using aliens who are about as different socially as, say, contemporary American society is from Heian Japanese society, and much less different than either is from Sparta. The things that might make them more socially different don’t wind up making them actually socially different — I mean shonun have reproductive seasons, but this makes no difference to their societal development as far as the reader can tell. This is fine because bringing out societal, behavioral, and psychological differences would be antithetical to what Cherryh is doing with this story.
B) Aliens that look pretty human, but aren’t (quite) as human as they look.
— Foreigner. Here, the aliens are pretty human behaviorally, but they have these emotions that aren’t quite like human emotions, there is fertile ground for misunderstandings, and thus we had the War of the Landing. The emotional differences are a big, big part of the story and intrinsic to what Cherryh is doing with the story. But at the same time, the atevi are more or less accessible to the human reader, because, I mean, that’s pretty important.
C) Aliens that don’t look human, but are socially, psychologically, and emotionally identical to humans.
— Mindtouch and others by Hogarth. There are all these nonhuman aliens, but they’re all basically varieties of furry quadrupedal humans. Not quite. But basically, that’s what they are. Also, socially they’re identical to humans. I don’t mean all of the different types of aliens are identical to one human society. I mean they’re basically all variable within the typical human types of societies — not as different as the Spartans. They occupy one end of a similarity spectrum — they’re just like humans, basically.
D) Aliens that don’t look human, and are socially and psychologically different from humans.
— The Cloud Roads by Wells. I love this story so much. Although the Raksura are socially different from humans and have different reflexes, and that’s very neat, emotionally and psychologically they are VERY similar. This is one reason the story carries so much emotional impact. Wells doesn’t have to persuade the reader that Moon is a sympathetic and relatable protagonist. He is incredibly sympathetic and relatable right from the first moment. But the different reflexes are a great touch, and of course the society is unique.
— A Darkling Sea, Cambias. Everybody loves the Ilmartans, including me. They are the aliens who live in lightless seas of Europa and who resemble 9-foot long lobsters, and for a species that are so exceedingly different physically and occupy such an exceedingly different ecological niche, they’re remarkable similar to humans socially, behaviorally, and emotionally. Not completely identical. But really very similar. This gives the reader something to get hold of. The Imartans do work well in the story. But their society is rather close to ordinary human societies, except for reproductively, which I grant is pretty different. Okay, very different.
— A Fire Upon the Deep, Vinge. You have to be kind of different when your personality is a gestalt of individual dog-like creatures. There are lots of features of the tines that are different from humans. Emotionally, they’re still quite similar. It’s hard to write aliens who are emotionally very dissimilar from humans and still have them work for human readers.
— Mother of Demons, Flint. Here are the giant mollusks. I had a hard time deciding to put this book in this category. I basically did that not because of the weapon-swinging battle mollusk on the cover but because of the other species, the Maia, who are so crucial to human survival. They really are not at all like humans.
Emotionally quite similar, but socially pretty different, and that impacts the emotional experience of life too. There’s the plural thing for the female turun and the social isolation of the male turun. Plus a strong instinct to close ranks and defend the family (for the females) versus attack as individuals (for the males). Much less tendency to generalize from family to city-state or nation. Much less aggressive than humans. Plus seeing things as fours and multiples of fours, not as dichotomies of two.
We should get deeper into turun society and the integrated human/turun society in the next book, if I ever get to it, sigh.
SO, what is YOUR favorite alien species in SF? I would greatly appreciate suggestions because here comes this panel, and also, did I miss any categories?
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Diane Duane has some really wonderful aliens in her Star Trek books. She does a great job with many different species, but the sentient spiders might be my favorite.
Do “humans who have diverged so much that they’ve become socially, emotionally, and possibly even physically alien” count as a new category? Because I adore your Invictus Ubezhishche too, and gosh now I need to reread.
Karin Lowachee’s striviirc-na, from the Warchild series, are another good example of aliens in category B, I think: they’re humanoid but don’t look human and they aren’t psychologically human, but there’s just enough common ground for alliances and misunderstandings, and for humans raised among the striviirc-na to believe they can cross that gap.
Well, there are the cheela from Dragon’s Egg.
Are parasitic aliens their own category? Like, Coccoon, or And All the Stars, etc? It’s a category that I don’t generally read because they give me the heebie jeebies, but not sure if it’s covered in the current list
This is very interesting to me, because my biggest complaint when reading stories with aliens in them is that the aliens are usually too understandable and I WANT them to not make sense (unless there is some underlying explanation for how everybody has a common biological origin). I thought the best part of No Foreign Sky was how genuinely confusing the enemy ship was.
ooh! the aliens in Serpent’s Reach by Cherryh. the hive things, the majat. Not very understandable.
Kate, for me it depends entirely on the story. If I happen to be reading a book called “The Alien’s Mail-Order Bride,” then the more human the aliens are, the better. If the aliens are obviously very different from humans physically and if their ecological niche is clearly very different, then I want VERY MUCH for them to be different from humans. It makes absolutely no sense whatsoever for nine-foot lobsters who live in a light-free environment to be emotionally and mentally similar to humans …
… you know, I should have thought of this MUCH EARLIER, but Cherryh has GREAT non-understandable aliens — the methane-breathers in the Chanur series! The knn and the tca. I’m adding them to my REALLY ALIEN category right now. AND, I bet those aliens served as an unrecognized influence for the really alien aliens in NFS. I didn’t think of that at all, but I bet they did.
I specifically got bored with hive aliens long before I read Serpent’s Reach, but yes. The lizards in 40,000 in Gehenna too, though we don’t see a lot of them.
I second Diane Duane, but it’s her Young Wizards books that I like the aliens from. FCOL, book 1 has a sentient black hole and if that’s not alien I don’t know what is! Although my favourite is Pont from book 5. Tiny part, but very interesting and alien alien. Pont is one alien who is five spheres that move independently, and communicates by chiming… like bells.
A subcategory of incomprehensible aliens are the ultra-powerful ones who serve as a plot device and/or a vehicle for the numinous. The monolith builders in 2001: A Space Odyssey are an example of both. The Jovians and their peers in John Varley’s Eight Worlds setting are pure plot device.
A classic example of human-scale aliens who don’t think like humans is Tweel in Stanley Weinbaum’s “A Martian Odyssey”, a rare pre-Golden Age SF story that still holds up. (Or anyway was generally considered to hold up a few decades ago, when I knew more about SF fandom.)
Oh, the mention of Jovians made me think of great aliens — the ones from Up the Walls of the World by James Tiptree Jr! (Alice Sheldon!)
I remember enjoying the aliens in Embassytown by China Miéville, I think they were a good example of category D.
Becky Chambers has lots of alien species with their own quirks and biologies, but I don’t think I found any particularly memorable.
This is a TV show, but I thought the sentient biomechanical starships in Farscape were pretty cool.
Julie E. Czerneda has some very good non-human aliens. I think you were the one who explained they were based in real biology, which helped make them more believable.
G.S. Jennsen’s Amaranthe series (plural) has a lot of different aliens in a sort of multiverse-tour, including sentient crystals and a sentient plant-world, with the whole multiverse travelspace set up by more alien/post-human entities as a sort of computer-simulation to look for a solution to an intractable problem.
I agree that most of the aliens in Hogarth’s series are very human-like, but most of them were created by long-ago genetic engineering. The books also include a few “true alien” species who are very different, e.g. the Flitzbe who are furry round balls and don’t speak, but share emotions and images telepathically.
I’m not sure if it’s a different category of aliens, but it’s a specific category of story: the aliens are very different and dangerous or seemingly monstrous, but they are pursuing an understandable goal – often protecting their young – and finding anunderstanding can resolve the danger. Examples are the Horta in Devil in the Dark, TOS; the creators of the radiation vortexes in Doc Smith’s The Vortex Blasters, and many of the aliens being treated at the Sector General hospital in James White’s books.
OtterB, thanks for reminding me about the “true aliens” in Hogarth’s series. I’d forgotten about them.
I liked the “less alien” genetically engineered species, but they really are implausibly human given that they’re supposedly part cat, or whatever. They all have perfectly human psychology, as far as i recollect.
Agreed the genetically engineered species are quite human. They have differences but not enormous ones. It’s more accurate to call them cultural rather than psychological. You could, I suppose, argue that the original genetic engineers were building companions for humans and therefore human-like psychology was intentional. But that doesn’t change the category of your taxonomy that they belong in.
Tanya Huff has a mil SF series involving Sgt. Torin Kerr who is human, but who serves with, and fights against, various alien races. I think Huff does a good job of differentiating the various alien races.
That’s my favorite military SF series, Jeanine, and a great example of creating aliens that serve the story.
I was just thinking about Larry Niven’s Known Space which contains, among other aluen species, the Kzinti.
*alien. Sigh.