Yes, science fiction writers don’t write truly alien characters because the market is too small.
Aliens who don’t make sense are basicly all the same alien.
Aliens who make sense according to some logic that doesn’t fit human feelings can be an interesting intellectual puzzle. But they aren’t real, they’re puzzles. You can figure out the logic.
Aliens who start out not making sense but then start to make more and more sense as it goes along, and you keep fitting things together to understand things you didn’t see before, and at the end of the story you still don’t get it all—I find that satisfying, but it’s hard to write like that. CJ Cherryh has made solid attempts at it. She has aliens that are very much like big smart cats, but the longer she wrote about them the more like humans they got. In 40,000 in Gehenna she had aliens that were a lot like alien ants. One of her less successful stories. She wrote one where the aliens were like truly giant earthworms who communicated by building structures. She wound up with humans who could communicate with them after a fashion, but who weren’t very good at translating. It was odd.
Larry Niven’s “puppeteers” were reasonably alien. Herbivores who had technology that let them live forever. If you were this kind of alien all you had to do was keep your place in the herd and you need never die. But ordinary ones were not allowed to reproduce at all, there was no place for more of them. And any individual who was willing to get in a spacecraft or go face-to-face with dangerous aliens like human beings was classified as insane and snubbed. Things that we would consider reasonable risks were not reasonable for them, when they might live forever. However, Niven wrote a short story, “Safe at any Speed”, in which immortal human beings behaved precisely the way his puppeteers did, and they seemed quite human. Niven at 40 years old had a quite limited concept of how 200-year-old humans would behave, much less immortal aliens. Still, his stories were interesting and they sold well.
Some people consider human beings inhuman when they do something that is considered socially unacceptable. Dictators who start purges that kill many of their own supporters, like Stalin, say. Or Mao. But people who get into high-stakes gambling will do all sorts of things for the chance to win, when the stakes are high. And dictators play for the highest stakes, it’s somewhat rare for them to lose and come out of it alive. The ones who survive and come to the USA etc tend to die in a few years of various things, typically cancer. They aren’t that different.
Yes, science fiction writers don’t write truly alien characters because the market is too small.
Aliens who don’t make sense are basicly all the same alien.
Aliens who make sense according to some logic that doesn’t fit human feelings can be an interesting intellectual puzzle. But they aren’t real, they’re puzzles. You can figure out the logic.
Aliens who start out not making sense but then start to make more and more sense as it goes along, and you keep fitting things together to understand things you didn’t see before, and at the end of the story you still don’t get it all—I find that satisfying, but it’s hard to write like that. CJ Cherryh has made solid attempts at it. She has aliens that are very much like big smart cats, but the longer she wrote about them the more like humans they got. In 40,000 in Gehenna she had aliens that were a lot like alien ants. One of her less successful stories. She wrote one where the aliens were like truly giant earthworms who communicated by building structures. She wound up with humans who could communicate with them after a fashion, but who weren’t very good at translating. It was odd.
Larry Niven’s “puppeteers” were reasonably alien. Herbivores who had technology that let them live forever. If you were this kind of alien all you had to do was keep your place in the herd and you need never die. But ordinary ones were not allowed to reproduce at all, there was no place for more of them. And any individual who was willing to get in a spacecraft or go face-to-face with dangerous aliens like human beings was classified as insane and snubbed. Things that we would consider reasonable risks were not reasonable for them, when they might live forever. However, Niven wrote a short story, “Safe at any Speed”, in which immortal human beings behaved precisely the way his puppeteers did, and they seemed quite human. Niven at 40 years old had a quite limited concept of how 200-year-old humans would behave, much less immortal aliens. Still, his stories were interesting and they sold well.
Some people consider human beings inhuman when they do something that is considered socially unacceptable. Dictators who start purges that kill many of their own supporters, like Stalin, say. Or Mao. But people who get into high-stakes gambling will do all sorts of things for the chance to win, when the stakes are high. And dictators play for the highest stakes, it’s somewhat rare for them to lose and come out of it alive. The ones who survive and come to the USA etc tend to die in a few years of various things, typically cancer. They aren’t that different.