Science Fiction Aficionados discussion
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identifying with characters
Here's a book with an alien as the protagonist:Nor Crystal Tears
I read it a long time ago, so I don't remember much other than I liked it a lot, so it probably worked for me.
Kirsten,I'm going through a list of questions I have for readers--what better place to do it than GR? I read and write thrillers AND sci-fi, so yes, similar questions for different audiences. ;-)
Scott,
I'll check it out. I think it's a challenge to read or write a novel and not humanize the alien.
We'll count this one as working for you.
r/Steve
A much more recent favorite--Under the Skin has an alien protagonist, though whether she is a "good guy" or not could be open to interpretation. In any case, her alien-ness is portrayed well yet I did identify with her.
Scott, Both books sound like good reading and study material (to see how it's done). r/Steve
I've stated in other threads (here and/or elsewhere) That I believe all aliens in fiction fall into three types:Type I: The human in a funny mask. They look alien (more or less), but are pretty much just humans in a different kind of body. These are the kinds readers can understand and identify with because they are analogous to human experience. Most Star Wars and Star Trek aliens are like this. Their cultures may be different from ours, but no more so than human cultures have differed from each other across the years.
Type II: The Beast. They are essentially monsters that only exist to eat, kill, destroy. These are always bad guys put in for easy action, excitement, and thoughtless jump scares. The Blob, Godzilla, the Xenomorphs from Alien(s). They can be smart, or dumb, but they're always obstacles.
Type III: The Enigma. They are alien, and therefore cannot be understood. They are hardly ever seen and never explored as characters because they cannot be understood in human thought/culture. They're the boogiemen, they're almost gods or forces of nature. The ocean in Solaris, the Pattern Jugglers and Inhibitors/Wolves from Alastair Reynolds's Revelation Space universe. They can be benevolent, neutral, or hostile but they are never fully understood.
There are some that cross between these, such as the Martians in H.G. Wells's War of the Worlds which could be seen as either/both Type II or/and Type III. And then there's the enemy race in Peter F. Hamilton's Pandora Star and Judas Unchained ... we learn all about its evolutionary strategy and motivations so that it essentially becomes a Type I, but functionally in the story it's solidly a Type II, bent on annihilation.
Essentially everything I've seen/read boils down to those three categories. I'd like to find something that is none of the above, but frankly can't come up with any.
Micah,I like that classification scheme, although not all enigmas are necessarily boogiemen. I can (and did) imagine a collective intelligence beyond Human's comprehension that might not be godlike (or devil-like), or a dispersed entity like Hoyle's Black Cloud.
Also, communication plays an important role because a lack of communication will create the enigma--Ender's wasp-like critters, for example, or critters using sonograms or light pulses. We might need computing help to communicate in these cases and have to realize that how ETs communicate might affect how they think.
One of the cleverest short stories I remember is Damon Knight's "To Serve Man" where there was a communication problem even though English was the common language.
r/Steve
Steven wrote: "Micah,I like that classification scheme, although not all enigmas are necessarily boogiemen. I can (and did) imagine a collective intelligence beyond Human's comprehension that might not be godlik..."
Yeah, didn't mean to imply that all of them are boogiemen. They can play a lot of roles. The monolith builders in 2001 were enigmas and not boogiemen. Neither was Solaris, btw.
Steven wrote: "Also, communication plays an important role because a lack of communication will create the enigma..."Communication issues could also form a Beast, though. I haven't read any of the Ender's stuff but from Wikipedia I can't really tell how the Formic (Buggers) were used. They appear to be either Type II or Type I, depending on how they're used. They're quite clearly based on familiar Earth animal behavior, which makes them familiar (hive mind -- yawn -- ruled by queens, trimorphic, etc. But I'm not sure if we're allowed to see their motivations and desires, or if they're treated by humanity simply as monsters to kill.
Someone once said that aliens which are essentially analogs to human creatures might count as a fourth category, but I'd argue it's how they're used that counts rather than what kind of biology they're given.
Manta's Gift by Timothy Zahn is a pretty good portrayal of an alien society. The viewpoint character is human, but everyone around him is not.A cross between Type I and Type III might be the Gand from Star Wars: X-Wing Books 1-4. They are comprehensible, but they are pretty alien, too. Any alien character is going to be written by and read about by humans, so there is only so much you can do.
Hmm...Yea, I sorta can side with the Martians in Martians, Go Home. I lean slightly on the side of anarchy. I do like to see how people react to the unusual. In high school people often asked me if I wanted a stick of chewing gum. I would ask "can I do whatever I want with it since it would be mine?" They always said yes of course, I would take the gum and throw it on the floor. I got great enjoyment from their facial reactions. From anger to discust, smiles always on my face.
I also sided with another Martian from Stranger in a Strange Land. Valentine Michael Smith was another favorite character of mine. One that also went against the social norms. Yea I have tattoos also :). However Valentine Michael Smith was "THE good guy", he was the winner in this book. Those that choose the social norms of the times were the losers. Even in today's times Same sex marriages, gambling and tattoos in today's times are becoming accepted by today's society. The social norms of the past were the losers... Well at least in this book they were.
Yea, it is my DNA, the slightly on the anarchist side, in a Good Way :)
Mickey,Stranger in a Strange Land used to be called the hippy's bible. I always say that an author's politics shouldn't matter if s/he can tell a good story, and Heinlein, like Niven, could extrapolate to some really weird stuff. His Moon is a Harsh Mistress makes the rebel-aiding AI an MC. His Friday was one of the first to champion the kick-ass female protagonist. And yes, some later stuff bordered on anarchy.
An early writer we often forget is C, S, Lewis, His Out of the Silent Planet features some human-like aliens that are still strange. So does Burroughs in his classic John Carter series, One might often wonder how they would answer my questions today,
Artificial or cyborg intelligence and collective intelligence probably offer an easy way to create ET protagonists or antagonists without worrying too much about biology, but, as Micah says, the biological details aren't that important once the communication problem is solved.
Inre the Beasts, we have plenty of humans who fit into that category, :-)
r/Steve
PS. Niven's Ring World stories have some weird ETs too.
Steven wrote: "Mickey,Stranger in a Strange Land used to be called the hippy's bible. I always say that an author's politics shouldn't matter if s/he can tell a good story, and Heinlein, like Niven, could extrap..."
Yes, but were you asking if the protagonists was the Good Guy and not just the bad guy from an alien point of view. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress are not aliens but humans changing the social norms.
Another book where aliens changed the human race for the positive (subjective here) is from Octavia E. Butler
Steven wrote: "Kirsten,I'm going through a list of questions I have for readers--what better place to do it than GR? I read and write thrillers AND sci-fi, so yes, similar questions for different audiences. ;-)
..."
LOL! Just teasing!
Mickey,I was referring to our POV inre aliens. Valentine Smith is considered a good guy by some humans and the Martians.
I guess it's a matter of interpretation. To me that AI Michael seemed pretty human, but some would call him alien. It becomes blurred at times. In Pohl's HeeChee trilogy, are the humans who are stored in cyberspace still humans? Or, by becoming zeroes and ones, are they now alien? Same question, but in the other direction, for that Asimov robot who became human (what was the title of that novella?).
Hogan's Giants trilogy offers some good examples of Type III ETs that intertwine in a strange way with human beings' past,
The possibilities are endless, so I guess I should rephrase my question: how far from human can a character be and still be interesting, intriguing, and resonating with human sci-fi readers. I imagine there's a bell curve to be had there.
r/Steve
Kirsten,I figured you were teasing. Looks like the genre lists for our reading are similar.
My reading spectrum is broader, though. I'm currently reading several books, and one is a bio of Eisenhower. I rarely post what I'm reading on GR because I'm done before I can update!
r/Steve
Steven wrote: "The possibilities are endless, so I guess I should rephrase my question: how far from human can a character be and still be interesting, intriguing, and resonating with human sci-fi readers. "I my world, to be human depends on ones DNA parameters. As for aliens behaving like humans, I will leave that up to writers.
However, if I uploaded my mind into a robot, I would no longer consider myself human, but "me" in a machine body.
Micah wrote: "I've stated in other threads (here and/or elsewhere) That I believe all aliens in fiction fall into three types:"While those are certainly common categories I can think of a few that IMO fall outside of them. Jack McDevitt and Terry A. Adams have given us aliens who, while there may be some degree of communication or interaction with humans, are still very much alien.
The alien life form that I'd contribute to this discussion are the 'cheela' from Robert L. Forward's Dragon's Egg and Starquake.The cheela are, maybe, a unique contribution in SF. They become in a very short time beneficial to mankind and then are rescued by their new allies, humanity. Not monsters or humanoid. While very alien in form we form a relationship with them. The science that Forward explores in the story is very detailed and well thought out. It is the nature of the alien life and mankinds relationship with them that makes the two works superb.
Micah wrote: "all aliens in fiction fall into three types:Type I: The human
Type II: The Beast
Type III: The Enigma"
I appreciate the attempt to classify aliens. However, your classification is so broad that it encompasses almost all the types of characters in fiction in general. These are broken down into
I: The protagonist
II: The antagonist
III: The supporting character (for either the protagonist or antagonist)
In fact, your numbering scheme almost directly parallels the one I just provided for general characters in any story. I point this out because I think the distinction of limited use. Once you define the one of three types the character can be, what then?
Your classifications are stated in such a way as to allow you to narrow them somewhat, but then I think once you narrow them you open yourself to counterexamples.
For example, what type would Spock fit into in your classification? He's not I. Funny, II. The Antagonist, or III. All that hard to understand. Where do the cylons of the modern (not classic series) Battlestar Galactica go? The formics in Ender's Game are arguably #2, but develop into something that eludes your categories later in the series as well. #3 might seem to fit the closest, but Card tells us so much about Formics that they are not that enigmatic in the end. Even such classical characters as Frankenstein's monster and the various races of Martians described by Edgar Rice Burroughs in his John Carter series
defy these easy classifications.
Dan,I think we're getting distracted with the classifications. My query was more general. Maybe I should have made it a poll? LOL.
This classification discussion reminds me of the more general genre discussion. Taxonomic exercises (ET classifications and genres are but two examples) indicate human beings' need to label things, to take a large data set and put order into it. This might be a sign of both human and ET intelligence, but it often gets us in trouble.
For example, I got in trouble early on by saying I write mystery, thriller, and sci-fi novels. Some readers would say, "Which one?" Truth be told, I don't take those genres as exclusive. Same goes for Micah's categories.
CD's mention of Forward's Cheela helps us answer my main query: we can stray pretty far from "human" and still have weird ETs serve as primary characters. Clearly, it still must be done in a way that human readers can still relate to that ET-ness. Moreover, humans and ETs each thinking the other weird can eventually come together, and that can make a good story.
r/Steve
Wouldn't Spock classify as a machine?At least he seem to play somewhat the same role of the android trying to figure out what it means to be human...
Another thing, when we discussed Michas taxonomy in the other thread I tried to argue other alien categories of the pet/fauna-variety, because sometimes you have aliens of lower than human intelligence that often resemble earth counterparts (like telephatic tree-cats or potted plants), which do not have a lot of agency beyond their defined nature.
Agency and whether aliens are able to diverge from the nature the author has decided to invest in them is an interesting discussion in itself like Dan hinted at (is it only "human" aliens that may diverge from their nature, while everybody else is planet of the hats?).
Niels wrote: "Wouldn't Spock classify as a machine?At least he seem to play somewhat the same role of the android trying to figure out what it means to be human...
Another thing, when we discussed Michas taxon..."
Spock and androids like Data are all type I in my book. We understand them from a very human perspectives. They are basically human minus emotion (Spock, of course, being a half-breed becomes the natural focus for exploring emotion because he wants to be Vulcan pure logic, but often is plagued by his human, emotional side). And since we all (readers/viewers) have emotion, we can imagine creatures who are just like us in all but our emotions. These characters are not put in to explore their alien qualities, but to comment and point out observations about our own human nature. So they really are just a human variant.
Pet/fauna-variety aliens certainly exist but they are not POV characters any more than are cats and dogs POV characters. And as soon as you try to make them POV characters (reference Philip K Dick's "Roog"), you turn them into people in different skin.
My point really has never been about the categories themselves, but the difficulty of addressing aliens as being truly alien in fiction. The real issue is that we're humans writing for other humans. In order for readers to understand aliens, we cannot make them truly alien. Someone once said that the trouble with aliens is that you can always see the human inside the suit. I don't see how it can be otherwise without either making the alien a monster, or by making them an enigma.
Probably the most truly alien I've ever read was Stanislaw Lem's Eden. I had absolutely no f'ing clue what was going on in that alien encounter story ... and neither did the human crew in it. The aliens were truly enigmas even though they did interact with the MC and crew. There was no real communication, and there was very little understanding gained throughout the book. From the reader's reference it all became very surreal.
As for the categories I gave mirroring the types of characters in fiction, I don't find that argument very compelling. Type I aliens can be all three kinds of characters. Type II are pretty much always antagonists. Type III can be all three kinds of characters. So the only real parallel is that there are 3 categories.
Micah,I learned recently that there is a subgenre of cozy mysteries called cat mysteries where the felines solve the crime. There's a big discussion going on about whether they should talk or not. Sometimes humans seem to be the ETs I can't understand. LOL.
r/Steve
Steven wrote: "Micah,I learned recently that there is a subgenre of cozy mysteries called cat mysteries where the felines solve the crime. There's a big discussion going on about whether they should talk or not...."
Well ... you got me there!
Micah,The mutant cat in one of my books can "talk to humans" with the same type of implanted wi-fi translator handled by an AI as in some of my other books. The cat is an MC who can help kids with their calculus. Forget the self-promo please but does that cat fit in one of your categories? Probably not, but he is a mutant.
I thought I might be able to claim I wrote the first cat mystery. LOL.
r/Steve
Hate to tell you but cats have been solving mysteries since ancient Egyptian times.
Micah wrote: "As for the categories I gave mirroring the types of characters in fiction, I don't find that argument very compelling. Type I aliens can be all three kinds of characters. Type II are pretty much always antagonists. Type III can be all three kinds of characters. So the only real parallel is that there are 3 categories. "I think it would make more sense to consider it a three-dimensional model with three axes:
Alienness: Understandable/not understandable
Intelligence: Intelligent/not intelligent
Agency: Slave of instinct/able to adapt
Then the most boring alien fauna would be the understandable, non-intelligen slaves of instinct (e.g. planet of the hats)
And the most complicated enigmas would be not understandable, intelligent and able to adapt.
In order to construct good aliens, you would need to adjust the three parameters in order to reach some golden middle way that is not boring and not impossible to understand.
Aliens (from Aliens): Understandable, non-intelligent, but able to adapt = interesting fauna that is very good at eating peopleTeddy-bears from Lost Fleet: Understandbale, intelligent, slaves of instinct = boring and hyper-aggressive
Tree cats from Honor Harrington: Understandable, semi-intelligent, some agency (but turns out to be more advanced) = a lot of personality but not interesting because they don't do anything.
Puppy-thingies from Zones of thought: At first glance Disney characters, really understandable, intelligent and able to adapt = interesting
Star-fish aliens from Frozen Sky: (view spoiler)
Peccaninos from Enderverse: Semi understandable, semi-intelligent, able to adapt = very interesting
Aliens from Rendevous with Rama: understandable, not intelligent, driven by instinct = boring fauna
Surprising aliens are interesting
Niels wrote: "I think it would make more sense to consider it a three-dimensional model with three axes..."That's a good way of thinking about it. I kind of already do that in my mind when I think about aliens who are a blend of all my 3 original categories.
I'm not intending to imply that the categories are dull or bad or whatever. I'm just thinking of the difficulty in writing about the truly alien.
Imagine you're a chimpanzee ... oh wait, you can't because you're not a chimpanzee and you have no idea what a chimpanzee thinks/feels/experiences. There is literally no way to do that.
So you're either stuck writing from a human perspective where you presume to imbue the chimp with understandable thoughts and motivations; or you write about them as a whorl of thoughtless emotions which transform them essentially into monsters (or uncontrollable forces of nature); or you write about them from an external perspective wherein we admit that we have no real idea what's going on in their minds or what their goals and motivations are.
That's probably an oversimplification when it comes to chimps since they are so closely related to us ... but aliens?
I would probably never try use an alien or chimpanzee as protagonist, because I prefer mine a bit on the enigmatic side to retain suspension of disbelief...On the other hand, one of the things I really liked about the spider-aliens in Zones of thought/a deepness in the sky was the fact that the aliens had human names and emotions, which not only made them more human than the humans expected - and it even had a really good explanation...
There's plenty of opportunities to make interesting reveals when you don't go 1st person, because 3rd person characters and aliens can lie, surprise you, and good ones can even change their mind.
A bit of mental work trying to figure out the aliens is not a bad thing, but it's hard tomake them both mysterious and give enough background information for guessing without having an intolerable mr exposition...
Steven wrote: "Micah,I learned recently that there is a subgenre of cozy mysteries called cat mysteries where the felines solve the crime. There's a big discussion going on about whether they should talk or not...."
Do the talking felines actually talk to the human protagonists or are they talking to the reader?
Micah wrote: "Niels wrote: "Wouldn't Spock classify as a machine?At least he seem to play somewhat the same role of the android trying to figure out what it means to be human...
Another thing, when we discusse..."
Spock and Data are basically Pinocchio.
Kirsten *Dogs Welcome - People Tolerated" wrote: "Spock and Data are basically Pinocchio."Which is to say they are explorations of what it means to be human, a very human-centric thing to explore.
Micah wrote: "Kirsten *Dogs Welcome - People Tolerated" wrote: "Spock and Data are basically Pinocchio."Which is to say they are explorations of what it means to be human, a very human-centric thing to explore."
Except that they're not Type I aliens, because they're specificially NOT humans, and yet somehow they are...
Niels wrote: "Micah wrote: "Kirsten *Dogs Welcome - People Tolerated" wrote: "Spock and Data are basically Pinocchio."Which is to say they are explorations of what it means to be human, a very human-centric th..."
Don't forget, Spock is half human.
I thought all alien babes were conveniently killed after Kirk had sex with them in that show?
Niels wrote: "I thought all alien babes were conveniently killed after Kirk had sex with them in that show?"Remember Kirk's first love was always the Enterprise. Remember the episode with the alien's tears?
Niels wrote: "Except that they're not Type I aliens, because they're specificially NOT humans, and yet somehow they are..."
Actually they are Type I. Type I in my mind are any character that can be understood from a human perspective, even if they are devoid of certain normal human traits. That would include anthropomorphized animals (from Pixar to Planet of the Apes), robots with personal agendas (Robocop to the androids in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, aka Blade Runner), or creatures (alien, robotic, or whatever) who are human minus some given trait (Spock/Data or even the MC in Flowers for Algernon).
You can take Type I aliens and stick them in human skin and it would make no difference. Spock could just be a human with alexithymia. Or he could be a human from a society that overemphasizes intellect and control over emotion. Or he could be someone under the influence of drugs that let him concentrate his intellect but blunts emotion. It doesn't matter really that he has elf ears and green blood.
I don't know if a human could really interpret a totally alien character since he is human and sees through the lens of humanity.
Micah wrote: "Actually they are Type I. Type I in my mind are any character that can be understood from a human perspective, even if they are devoid of certain normal human traits. "In that case I don't see why your system is relevant or useful.
Because you just arrange all aliens on a linear spectrum similar to Scott Card's Hierarchy of foreigness with most of the interesting aliens thrown into type 1 (type 2 being monsters and type 3 just messing things up or being irrelevant).
Personally, I prefer a system that subdivide (your type 1) aliens based on some clear criteria that help you evaluate whether an alien race is well- or poorly written (for reviews/deciding whether to read a book), and for authors to create better aliens in the future.
Mod
here's something I don't find useful or relevant: when someone tells another person that their ideas aren't useful or relevant. let's try to keep these conversations respectful, okay?
Chill man.This thread is about how aliens are/can be used in fiction.
Originally, I quite liked Micahs classification, but Dan made some good points and then Micah kinda undermined it as a checklist for how to make good aliens (since most of them end up in type 1).
He's perfectly entitled to his models of thought if they make sense to him, I just don't find this particular one very useful as guideline for how to make interesting aliens.
Science fiction fans can be so funny. Many are so into the science part of it and get really serious about it all. Some are like me who is more into the escapist element. The adventure. The wonder. But I do like reading your thoughts. I never have thoughts like these at the time, but then it makes me reflect back after I hear this.
I am also in the camp that reads to escape reality. The real world is just so depressing. I feel good about myself when I Learn something or make something new. I enjoy books in which takes me somewhere new.
Niels wrote: "In that case I don't see why your system is relevant or useful.";D
I never said it was supposed to be used for anything. It was really just an observation.
Feel free to adapt it, enhance it, reject it, use it, re-invent it, or trash it however and as often as you like.
Steven's observation on the use of taxonomic exercises such as this one under discussion about aliens went further meta than my post, and got me thinking. We humans have been classifying for a very long time. Read any work of Aristotle, for example, and all you will see is attempts to subdivide reality similar to the exercise Micah undertakes in classifying aliens. Asking what purpose the categorization serves is a valid question worth exploring. For example, I can say, "I find that all writers use only three types of men in their writing: 1) short men - those less than 5'2", 2) medium men - those between 5'2" and 6'2", and 3) tall men - those over 6'2". In fact, I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that you can't possibly write about any other type of man. At least, I've never encountered another type of man that anyone has ever written about." After I make such a statement, and I think Micah's classification of aliens is similar, it may be valid to ask, "So what?"
To answer that last question, we have an intriguing Wikipedia post as a starting point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categor.... However, even this post only states there is a use for categorization. "Categorization implies that objects are grouped into categories, usually for some specific purpose. Ideally, a category illuminates a relationship between the subjects and objects of knowledge." Disappointingly, the post never says anything about what that "purpose" actually is, though the link to abstraction (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstrac...) touches on it.
Maybe we can derive it ourselves. Let's try to find the purpose in another classification attempt in order to see if we can by analogy use it to confer Micah's effort with purpose. Parts of speech have been classified in English (though not in other languages) into eight mutually exclusive categories. Setting aside the murky linguistic boundaries between problematic cases of classification for a moment, what purpose is served by this classification? Well, there are actually many. One is that we can say English is a subject-verb-object (noun-verb-noun) language, for example, and that because it is we have lost many verb declensions over time because they are redundant. The subject, which is stated first, is already known, so SVO languages lose verb declensions. We in fact have only one left in simple present tense: the -s in regular third person singular verbs. Verb-subject-object languages tend to keep verb declensions over time and seldom if ever drop them, which is the only difficult part of learning Spanish, for example.
Categorization then as can be seen from the above example is a sort of scaffolding technique. You make one categorization. Then when you own that categorization and it becomes an internal part of your thought processes, you can build another categorization scheme right on top of it as in the language example just given. Predictive rules for cases not yet thought of can result.
So, the question remains, where shall we take Micah's schema for classifying aliens? How can we build on it to create a different (original) kind of story about aliens? What predictive rules for cases of thinking about possibilities for writing aliens not yet thought of might result?
I think Micah's classification has already been useful in stimulating thought and discussion. This, it seems to me, is one of the points of classification generally. All such systems are partly personal – Micah hasn't read all the alien-containing books there are and I don't doubt that somewhere there are aliens who don't fall within his system. So it has another use – drawing our attention to books we may not have read or analysed. I think one of the ways of taking this forward is to ask the question, are there any other kinds of aliens other readers have found? and if so what parts of the schema would it change?
E A M Harris wrote: "I don't doubt that somewhere there are aliens who don't fall within his system...are there any other kinds of aliens other readers have found?"If Micah's aliens categorization is of the short men/medium men/tall men type I provided last post, and I think he tried to broaden his three categories so that it was, then finding an alien that does not fit into that schema will be difficult to say the least.
As far as your question about other kinds of aliens readers have found, the books with the widest variety of aliens I can remember having read was Alan Dean Foster's The Taken trilogy. The premise is that an every day sort of earth guy and his dog gets grabbed by this alien ship, placed in a zoo of all alien beings from all over the galaxies, and then taken very far away. How does he escape his "cage" and get back home to Earth?
The other aliens he meets on that ship and has to learn to communicate with is the most imaginative aliens science fiction I have read to date. I am not going to describe these aliens in order not to spoil the series, since for me the descriptions of them is a large part of what made it so good. It is also very funny while still maintaining its serious side, which is about the only way I personally can appreciate humor in a science fiction novel.
Science Fiction Aficionados
Books mentioned in this topic
Blindsight (other topics)Dragon's Egg (other topics)
Starquake (other topics)
Martians, Go Home (other topics)
Stranger in a Strange Land (other topics)
More...
Authors mentioned in this topic
Robert L. Forward (other topics)Octavia E. Butler (other topics)
I read many more books than I write, but in either case I'm often asking myself, "As a reader, does my humanity get in the way. Can a human being identify with an ET as a main character?" Many sci-fi stories feature ETs as antagonists (the bad guys), but can they be protagonists (good guys)?
Maybe this is a poll question, but I like to see the whys and wherefores in the responses. Please weigh in.
r/Steve
PS. OK, I have a personal agenda here, but I think it's a generally interesting question for sci-fi readers.