For the writer of speculative fiction, there’s a dodge most of us use—the human dressed in the alien suit. I don’t mean the guy dressed in a serape, lederhosen, Zulu head-ring, and carrying a samurai sword and boomerang (though it does make for an interesting picture); no, rather an alien entity that thinks and acts like a human. No matter what the form, be it tentacled, chitinous, or no form at all, they’re really human inside.

One reason for this, I think, is that it is extremely difficult for people to wrap their heads around what it means for an intellect to be truly different from that of a human. We’ve never met an intelligence of like level that wasn’t human. The whales possibly approach a human level of intellect, perhaps even exceed it in some directions, but even the people who work with them tend to anthropomorphize them.

Besides our own probable inability to conceive of the truly other, we writers have the further problem of communicating a truly alien mindset to our editors (who no doubt often accept us as examples) and, via them, to our readers. To be successful, first one group and then the other must be able to understand what we are attempting to describe in our story. This requires the use of hints and guideposts that are recognizable to those reading it and that allow them to form the mental construct that we are trying to get across. Unfortunately, these come from the human experience and, thus, introduce anthropomorphism into the picture of the alien.

This problem also affects the writer of fantasy just as much as the one writing about the blob who just blew in from Proxima Centauri. While one would expect a certain amount of commonality of thought between human, dwarf, and elf, what of non-humanoids? Why should an Ent or a dragon think in a way understandable to a human? One answer is that you’re telling a story, and it falls flat if the reader doesn’t understand the non-human character’s motivation. With fiction, even that other than science fiction and fantasy, we’re writing a form of allegory—i.e., a story using symbols (that rattling sound you hear is just Mr. Tolkien spinning at the thought that his stuff could be considered allegorical). If the readers are unable to use the symbols that they have learned through their life experiences to connect the dots, we’ve managed to produce sound and fury signifying nothing.

So, the question remains, could we even recognize a truly alien way of thinking as intelligence? And if we did, how would we communicate it in our writings? (For that matter, how could we even communicate with the entity in question? As one exasperated type said, “If we can’t understand the Japanese, how the heck are we going to understand the Martians?”)


19 July 2011: Feast of Aurea.