Let’s talk about aliens…

An FB friend asked (paraphrased), “In sci-fi, what is your take on aliens? One main school of thought is that alien life would be just that, alien. So bizarre as to be unintelligible to humanity.”

Call this a belief, but, despite claims by some scientific minds far smarter than my own, I don’t think alien life forms would be “unintelligible.” Vastly different and bizarre, certainly, but, “Nothing on earth or beyond it is closed to the power of man’s reason” (Ayn Rand, “Apollo 11” in The Voice of Reason, p. 176). It may take time—centuries—to understand, but the mysteries of our universe eventually yield to rational investigation, and this will include alien species. Of course, a great story could come from this initial state of non-understanding between humans and aliens. Just think of the movies Independence Day and Contact, let alone dozens of great scifi novels.

 When it comes to fiction, though, I respect the author who makes a genuine attempt to show a bizarre, nearly unintelligible alien species. Amy Thomson knocked it out of the park in The Color of Distance, in which the aliens spoke via their skin, which changed color to both display emotion and express thought. Orson Scott Card did a nice job with his Formics in The First Formic War trilogy. Humans’ inability to communicate with Formics led to war. The Formics, for their part, communicated telepathically, and, sensing no telepathic activity from humans, simply assumed that humans were a dumb animal species and acted accordingly, much like how humans disturb the habitats of animal species on Earth (but that’s another topic).

Ultimately, as a reader and writer, I need intelligible—even if bizarre—aliens. Eventually, Thomson’s human protagonist learned to speak with the aliens (I think she adapted her spacesuit to emit color). Card’s Formics and Humans, too, eventually learned to communicate and negotiate. For a writer to stick to the premise that alien species would simply and forever be “unintelligible” to humans would lead to a novel that, I think, very few readers would accept, let alone be able to appreciate. I don’t disparage a writer who wants to try it, and in fact, I’ll wish such writers good luck! Because they’ll need it.

On a final note, Card makes great points about writers developing alien species in his book, How to Write Science Fiction & Fantasy. I’ll share two of them. First, Card says, “Whenever you invent an alien creature, you should invest a great deal of effort in determining why, in evolutionary terms, its unusual features would have developed” (p. 50). Second, he reminds writers that an alien species ought to be as culturally and politically diverse as our own. Nothing screams amateur more than writing about an alien species whose members are all warriors or all philosophers or all greedy.

Ultimately, stories in any genre are about humans. Even if all the characters are non-humans, the story itself deals with human themes for human readers. Making aliens intelligible, evolutionarily unique, and at least as diverse as human society creates beautiful, memorable science fiction.

I mentioned The Color of Distance and The First Formic War trilogy. What books featuring memorable aliens have you read? Why were they memorable? Thanks for reading!