How (Not) to Make An Alien
by Mary Borjes
Everyone’s watched Star Trek – and seen the myriad races of ST aliens, all just like us except for the weird make-up on their foreheads. The point of the show is that, really, they’re just like us – not aliens at all. Nowadays, that’s not really enough for the hardcore SF enthusiast, a little more ‘realism’ is in order. That requires some fancy footwork, dodging a lot of the common errors that writers make when designing aliens and their cultures.
This isn’t exactly unexplored territory we’re trampling on. Creating those alien societies is one of the hot topics of writing science fiction, just as important as ‘world building’ is in fantasy. But while one can pretty safely assume there is some worldly basis for the creation of a milieu in the fantasy genre, a mythological or historical thread that a reader can grasp, it’s not a good idea to make those assumptions in science fiction. In fact, it’s not a good idea to make assumptions at all, as broad a field as science fiction is now.
We can’t make assumptions when creating aliens and alien societies, mainly because we aren’t aliens. It’s difficult to even ask the right questions you need to ask to create those aliens, much less answer them with ready made solutions. Faced with so many possibilities in a huge universe, one pitfall we can fall into is to self-limit our options too much. One approach to making convincing aliens, which admittedly can be pretty effective, is to create aliens based on an arbitrary determination of their environment. What is the technique the species uses to prosper on their world? What is their means of adaptation? Rabbits have big legs, humans have brains and thumbs, cows have big molars, etc., and aliens have… what? Do aliens share the process of categorization and abstraction that we call intelligence? Starting from the top down, we can make a world, and proceed to make species and go on to cultural adaptations.
The problem is that this portrays evolution as a simple cause and effect process. We can’t ignore the sometimes spontaneous nature of mutation, and the fact that not all mutation serves a purpose. It’s important to also bear in mind that many mutations, both physical and cultural, have a negative effect.
Another big assumption people make when creating run of the mill sfnal aliens is that they will somehow be like us – like the star trek aliens – that there would even be a frame of reference, a commonality that could be reached between human and alien. This isn’t necessarily the case. As humans we like to look out at the universe, filter it through the particular senses we’ve evolved and the abstract preconceptions that go along with them, and assume that a ‘consciousness’ or ‘awareness’ like ours is universal. It’s part of how we navigate the universe. But we’re writing science fiction here, asking the harder questions. Why would the universe or the beings in it be anything like us at all?
Should we, as writers, assume that the ‘part’ (humans) reflects the nature of the ‘whole’ (the universe)? Can we discern the beautiful and complex nature of man and his civilization from a nucleotide? Somewhat, but not really. And that’s where we are – trying to make a guess as to the nature of things based on our own limited information, and projecting our own wants, needs and characteristics onto the universe at large. But that projection does nothing to get closer to potential realities, which is what speculative fiction of every kind accomplishes when it’s working right. If we just project our own physiology and philosophy onto our fictional aliens, we get boring, comfortable aliens, not aliens at all, not beings that we can truly learn from.There is no need to settle for that, when there is really almost infinite possibility.
Themocracy
An interesting essay on SF aliens, and generally dead on. Too often we see our own culture(s) reflected in the physical and cultural contours of the alien other. While this works for Star Trek, Doctor Who, and various other “space adventure” SF tales, I agree with Mary that the aliens become trope at best and insulting at worse (though, when taken for what the stories are, they can be fun nonetheless). I would challenge this article, however, on a few points. 1) There is the assumption that the goal of speculative fiction “when working right” is to present realistic worlds not simply reflect the “part” as if it were the “whole”. This is a problem, as I take SF, in its great variety, to use the “whole” to reflect the “part” — i.e., what do we learn about humankind through this or that story? While realism is an important part of SF, it is not the real point of storytelling. This focus raising a more complex challenge as to how we both construct and read alien cultures. 2) Moving slightly beyond this essay, I wonder about the role of “aliens” for our cultural identity construction. Edward Said made an important critique regarding the construction of the “other” (and knowledge of the other), namely that such construction is really a process of using our “exotic other” to define ourselves. He called this process orientalizing (i.e., how the West constructs the East in order to reaffirm and empower the West). I wonder if we are doing something similar in recent SF – are we fascinated with aliens that are “really” alien, that is really “other”, because of a exotic fetish we have with the other? In Mary’s article, she indicates that for Star Trek the “similarity” between humans and aliens (especially, I would add, with aliens serving as mirrors for human cultures) collapses the “them/us” distinction: we’re all basically the same. For Star Trek, this tendency fits into the ideology of the show, the social issues that the stories speak to. I wonder what the “realistic” alien gives us? What narrative function does such characterization facilitate? What do we “speak to” or what are we trying *not* to speak to? My apologies for this long comment. The essay sparked several thoughts that I wanted to share, and extend my appreciation to the author for her wonderful essay.
Gregory Benford’s novels have covered some of this ground, in presenting very inhuman aliens and exploring human reactions to them.