Writing Techniques: (Un?)Like Us

Recently, I took a look at whether or not you should explain things in fiction. (The answer: A definite maybe. Also, something I didn't specifically mention-if you want to talk about something like what I was referring to, or something else such as imaginary vehicle specifications, etc., obviously there's another option: Bonus materials and source guides. I mean, how much money has Star Trek made on that kind of stuff over the years? It's gotta be a lot.) At the end of the article, I hinted that I would be exploring another subject, that being how much like us intelligent alien beings may or may not be, especially in the fictional context.

This has always (since modern science fiction's roots at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth) been a controversial subject in serious fiction. The resemblance between aliens and ourselves found in most fiction is more or less inevitable; whether we physically anthropomorphize them for sake of convenience and budget, or we write them as "humans in funny suits" in the more figurative sense. (There are a number of common ways to write alien beings; Planet of Hats, Rubber Forehead Aliens, Intelligent Animals, Scary Dogmatic Aliens, Human Aliens, and Starfish Aliens. TVTropes, by the way, is pretty much tied with the Transformers Wiki for most awesome wiki ever.)

How seriously should you take this issue?

Well, one of the problems in a visual medium is that you can make aliens very alien, but they may be very hard for readers or viewers to follow if they aren't anthropomorphic enough to interpret their appearances... which of course has the further realism issue of aliens probably not having the same expression set as humans. (Strictly speaking, in human culture only smiling is universally recognized, though most cultures recognize more than that thanks to exchange of media.) In non-visual media such as novels, this is rather less problematic, as you can describe an expression and explain what it means, or even simply say "s/he smiled" and explain to the reader that it wasn't really a human smile but an equivalent expression that the character understands. (There is also the fact that cultural exchange with aliens can potentially create self-anthropomorphized aliens who are trying to be friendly, who may smile even though they never would within their own society.)

The real deep issue, though, is alien minds. Can a writer truly write an alien mind, or will it just be weird behavior for the sake of weirdness? And how alien can a mind truly be? Since minds and personalities can be expressed with equal ease in any media, provided you know how, this is a deeper issue.

I tend to think that the example used by the guy who inspired the previous post on the subject (the author of Lovecraft is Missing) is a good one to refer to for convenience-the Predators of the same-named movie franchise. They are an excellent example because they appear in a movie where the point is trying to figure out what they are.

Let's generally examine the appearance of the Predator. While they are invisible, we know from various junk that they are generally pretty humanoid in shape, and in fact mostly look like really ugly deformed Klingons. (Though apparently they have their fans. Don't ask-my sister has anecdotes.) The other primary thing we know about Predators (and I'm just drawing from what little I know about the early movies, not the Alien Vs. Predator review which complained about their too-human behavior) is that they like to hunt. Preferably, smart, tough, and well-armed prey. And they do it for the mere sake of hunting.

Now, generally speaking, I know a decent amount of biology. If something is bipedal, stands upright, has two four-to-six-fingered hands, two eyes, and a mouth on its head below its eyes, it's going to be wired a lot like a human in terms of its motor nerves, etc. Even if it has developed from some kind of smarter-than-average slug originally, those similarities suggest it probably would have had a reasonably similar lifestyle to the human one in the developmental stages, i.e. banding together, using tools, hunting in the plains or the forests or the mountains using probably similar techniques. If something looks as human as the Predator ultimately does, it's going to have a similar way of viewing the world to a human no matter how divergent its other features are.

So we've established that something like that has something in common. What else can we look at? Well, biologically, we could presume that their distant ancestors had significant differences, and we can presume that probably, they have natural ways of expressing and communicating that derive from that heritage rather than what humans have. The biochemistry of their brains may even contribute to significant behavioral differences, and they may have some quirks, such as hermaphroditism, egg-laying, multi-stage development, extreme sexual dimorphism, or something that Earthly biology doesn't even have an equivalent to, that also set them apart. (Now, obviously, I'm starting to go into somewhat more general ideas than the Predator itself. Bear with me.)

At the end of the day, though, we still have something that:

• Hungers. (It's an animal, thus it hungers.)
  
• Probably sleeps. (Only really stupid animals don't sleep on Earth.)
• Is social. (They couldn't have developed serious technology if they didn't have a pretty complicated society.)
  
• Uses tools. (Weapons and clothing are specialized tools.)
  
• Maps and processes the environment with stereoscopic vision. (Just because it's an infrared vision type thing doesn't make it that different.)
  
• Can probably hear pretty well. (It's likely to have been at a significant evolutionary disadvantage if it couldn't as a species.)
• May or may not have a similar sense of smell and taste. (Maybe that's what the ugly mouth is for.)
  
• Has enough (let's face it, way more than enough) free time and resources to waste it on recreational activities (though the Predator probably puts a bit more emphasis on it than mere recreation).

Notice that, except for the first three, not all of these technically apply to all humans. There are feral children (who may not use tools, and actually aren't always social, either...), blind people, deaf people, people with messed up senses of smell and taste, and people who don't have any free time or resources.

So my conclusion, at least with regards to something with a similar body type to ours, is that we could probably understand it with some effort, no matter how weird it was to us at first. Past the biology, I tend to think it'd all just be culture.

But even if the creature was much more different, I tend to think the boundaries wouldn't be insurmountable. The first three items on my list of things in common would probably still be in common if they were literal freaking starfish aliens. And even a sapient carrot would still likely have hunger in common despite being a plant, because hunger figuratively refers to things such as scarcity in the environment that must be dealt with, and even plants must (figuratively) stare down scarcity.

A being with a big, smart brain usually has to be pretty active to fuel that big brain, and pretty active to fill that brain with useful information that can make that being smart enough to become relevant to this discussion. Anything that can be that active also has the potential for boredom and for curiosity. (Not to say they would definitely have it. But if they're smart, they had to get that way somehow, and curiosity is the quickest, easiest way I can think of.)

Really, saying some alien is incredibly, incomprehensibly strange is shorthand for saying "too weird to explain in five minutes." And it's also total bunk. As I said with regards to the strange in the previous, chances are we can understand, if we have an opportunity to do some research and are patient, no matter how darned alien those darned aliens are. If you say you can't, you really just don't want to.

-Signing off.