Mind Meld was a feature on the website SF Signal, curated by Paul Weimer. For each Mind Meld, Weimer would send a question to several authors and fans, asking for their answers, which would then be published together. This page provides my answer to one of the Mind Melds I participated in, along with a listing of the other authors who responded to that particular question.Question: This week, we sent our distinguished panelists this question:
Q: With the upcoming movie Prometheus, aliens are on our minds here. What makes for a good depiction of aliens in Science Fiction? What are some examples of that in practice?
Here is how they responded…
Kameron Hurley, Catherine Russell, Les Johnson, Mike Cobley, Gini Koch, Christie Yant, Jeff Petterson, Cynthia Ward, Ty Franck, and Philip Athans
Steven H Silver is a fourteen time Hugo nominee. His most recent short story, "In the Shadows of Broadway," appeared on the podcast StarShipSofa. He is the editor and publisher of ISFiC Press and this year, he's spending a lot of his time working as one of the vice chairs of Chicon 7, the 70th Worldcon.
There are two aspects to the creation of a good depiction of aliens in science fiction, one of which is more important in visual science fiction (art, television, and movies) than it is in literary science fiction.
In writing science fiction, an author can describe anything she wants to and it is up to the reader to create a mental image of the alien in their mind, the strangeness of the creature's visual form is only limited by the joint imagination of creator and the reader. Artists can depict any sort of aliens they want, as long as their abilities can keep up with their imagination. In television and film, the image of the creature is limited by the abilities of either the costume designer or, more recently, the computer animators.
An example of these limitations is, of course, the aliens which featured in classic episodes of Star Trek or Doctor Who. Most of their aliens appeared as people in rubber masks, although occasionally an experiment would produce the Daleks or creatures which were made out of light and pulsating colors. One of the aliens which clearly suffered from this limitation were the Menoptera, featured in the first Doctor Who serial "The Web Planet." Despite the writer's ability with the story, these aliens come across as looking no more realistic than John Belushi wearing his killer bee costume on Saturday Night Live. Conversely, by the time Doctor Who introduced the Vespiform in the episode "The Unicorn and the Wasp" computer generated imagery had advanced to the point of creating a realistic creature which could meet the needs of the aliens described in the writer's imagination.
Similarly, even in the short period from 1977 to 1984, Star Wars was able to move from the humans in latex prosthesis of the Mos Eisley Cantina to the puppetry of Jabba's Palace in Return of the Jedi, eventually introducing the computer generated aliens of the prequel trilogy such as the Kaminoans or the Geonosians (and compare the latter to the Menoptera or Vespiform).
With the use of first puppets and then computer animation, science fiction has opened up a new expanse of aliens, which will continue to advance as the computer technology improves. James Cameron's Pandorans are just the latest line of creatures to be introduced which are physically alien to terrestrial creatures, but which are given a realistic appearance on screen.
The other aspect of writing aliens, which is important in both visual and literary science fiction, harkens back to John W. Campbell, Jr.'s challenge: "Write me a creature that thinks as well as a man, or better than a man, but not like a man." Because literary science fiction does not include the visual aspect, the depiction of alien thought and activity becomes more important in these areas.
Truly alien thought processes are evident throughout science fiction. The titular creature in the movie Alien is ascribed motivation, but it is clear from watching the film that those motivations are projections of the humans who are trying to make sense of what the alien is doing. This can be contrasted by many of the aliens who appeared in the original Star Trek universe who are motivated by all too human thought processes no matter what color makeup was spread over their features or the prosthesis on their faces. Even the Klingons were provided with motivations which were easily defined within human terms.
In fact, in science fiction the alien does not need to appear alien at all on the surface. One of the most alien individuals in science fiction is Mike Resnick's mundumugu Koriba in his Kirinyaga cycle. On the surface, there should be nothing alien about this old man sitting on his terraformed asteroid. Koriba was educated at Cambridge and Yale and uses a computer. However, he has come to espouse a culture and way of life which is quite removed from the western civilization in which he was brought up, championing customs which are not only foreign to Western civilization, but in some cases anathema, ranging from infanticide to female circumcision. Although Koriba's attitudes are based on a real society, he is as alien as any creature to come from another planet.
In some cases, basic, stereotypical aliens can become much more as the author writes about them more. Larry Niven's Kzin began their lives as relatively one-dimensional aliens in the short story "The Warriors," but as Niven (and eventually other authors) began to explore the universe through which the Kzin moved, they became more and more alien. In these cases, the author starts out with a stock alien and they only become notable as the author begins to really flesh them out over time, severing them in many ways from their origins.
There is also the danger of making the alien too different from the way humans think. A gas bag creature floating in the atmosphere of a gas giant may not have enough in common with humans for an author to make them relatable to the reader. This doesn't mean authors can't realistically depict these extremely strange aliens, and many attempt to, and some succeed. They just don't often become the sort of aliens people remember since they are so outré.
Of course, what it comes down to is the author, artist, or designer thinking intelligently about the aliens they are trying to create, not just in an attempt make something cool, but trying to make it fit into its ecological (and sociological?) niche. An alien species can evolve as well in a fictional setting as one can in the real world. One that initially appears as a cliché can, in the long run, turn into something amazing.
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