On aliens.
- Why do people insist that aliens in SF should be utterly bizarre? You know, methane-breathing hive-mind clouds of silicon that communicate by blinking lights and reproduce by budding in the flesh of passing astronauts?
Two things. One, the Weak Anthropic Principle (the Strong AP is, in my opinion, largely bogus) may be interpreted as meaning that humans are right in the middle of the road, biochemistry-wise. A number of aspects of terrestrial life appear to be the only option, or one of a very few similar options. We would need more samples to speculate further, but it really does seem that the laws of physics restrict life to something very like our model, at least under conditions remotely comparable to ours.
And two, and vastly more importantly, SF is shit you want people to look at. I'm sorry if that's confusing, but for the aliens in the story to be interesting, they must interact with humans. If the biosphere they come from is vastly different from that of Earth, you may have gotten around that "conditions remotely comparable to ours" thing, but guess what? Your story's gonna be restricted to the portrayal of a rousing game of "sea lion and squirrel" ("We have nothing at all to do with each other—and it's fun!"). People whose conditions are not remotely comparable do not interact. - The ane-ue had an interesting point, a while back, in a comment on one of my Avatar rants. Namely, that Pandora, being a moon (a forest moon...of a gas giant, inhabited by cutesy noble-savage aliens with rhinarium-type noses...), probably spends a lot of its time in its primary's shadow. And, she suggested, that might be why so much of the life there is bioluminescent.
Apparently it's actually because Cameron's a diving buff—actual justification for something in a film? Please, King of the World's got shit to blow up. I myself think that "science fiction" may almost be held to consist of coming up with those justifications, so you can guess my dismay at the current fashion of "nothing explained ever" so-called SF. For example, my felinoids' fur is iridescent, except for their stripes—the stripes are pigment, but the coloring is structural (that's sorta the reverse of pheasant feathers, look at the stripes on one sometime). That probably wouldn't pose any camouflage difficulties anyway, anymore than it does for pheasants, but it's helped by the fact most of the plants on their homeworld are themselves iridescent, thanks to having multi-layered cuticles, like some seaweeds.
Also, I think I mentioned it before, but my felinoids don't have a rhinarium. The skin on their noses is more like a bird's cere, and the nose isn't quite the same shape as a cat's. - Related to Avatar, while European colonization of the New World obviously gives examples of contact between wildly disparate cultures, only an idiot uses aliens for that sort of simplistic White Guilt narrative. Look at the real history: the Aztecs had it coming, the Apache and Sioux gave as good as they got, and it was only the kindness of the US government that the Comanche still exist (much higher-class horse-nomads than them have been dealt with much more harshly by the people they raided; let's just say Romania did not provide the Turks with a reservation, although Basarab Vlad III did give them, ahem, a forest).
There's a reason we remember the Long Walk and Trail of Tears as atrocities: they were. But, because learning the details is hard, people too often generalize from them to the assumption that every time force was used against Indians, it was wrong. That is not the case. A lot of Indians made a substantial proportion of their living raiding, and that raiding often at least as nasty as the European barbarian raids of the Dark Ages. - Not really alien-related but why do people insist on space prisons? Ask yourself, "do this civilization's spaceship-engines function by expelling an exhaust?" If the answer is yes, then they won't have off-world penal colonies, space-colonization is too expensive. If they run out of room to keep their criminals? Guess what, their civilization would've long since perished from the sheer body heat of the population, there's a lot of room on an Earth-sized planet.
Now, conceivably, less-than-spotless people might be selected for a dangerous colonization effort, and people might be offered a chance to work off debts as an incentive to join projects, but you're not gonna have penal colonies. You think prison's bad, try putting one on a nuclear submarine, because that's what a spaceship is.
The one exception is, you might get incredibly dangerous prisoners, deposed tyrants and the like, moved off-planet to try and neutralize their power-base and prevent rescue attempts, and so on. But you're still likely to have them moved to normal prisons, just on other planets, and I'm not sure that, even then, it wouldn't be too much trouble without reactionless drives. And hey, killing tyrants is usually preferred anyway—hanging Saddam was a big blow to the Iraq insurgency, but he would've become a rallying point for all kinds of trouble if we'd just carted him off to Gitmo or something. The same may be said of Qaddafi, though Qaddafi wasn't within a light year of as nasty as Saddam was. - Here's a question: why do aliens in SF never react to humans' sexual advances as they would to bestiality? Since that is, from a biological perspective, what it is. Are writers afraid to consider why we taboo bestiality? Generally speaking when a person is afraid to question a taboo there's one of two things happening; he's either afraid he won't be able to make a case for his standard, but still wants to keep the standard, or he's afraid that the standard will be found to apply to other things he had not previously tabooed.
So either SF writers are too chicken to be the guy who says there's no basis for forbidding bestiality, or they're afraid that the taboo on bestiality will cut into their little fetishes. If that seems harsh, please remember Heinlein's incest-fixation and Niven's rishathra (which isn't exactly bestiality, it's just only justifiable by assuming humans have many behaviors in common with bonobos—which they don't): SF writers are kinky sons of bitches.
It's a moot point to me; not only do my aliens react appropriately, but I do know the case for the bestiality taboo. Then again I don't get my ideas on sexuality from people with a vested interest in removing the nuclear family as a counterbalance to the power of the state and the corporation. - Avatar-related again, why is it always Native Americans people base aliens on? How about African or Australian aborigines? Or any of the various tribes of Southeast Asia, or the Pacific Islands? Nobody's ever had Polynesians in space, to my knowledge. And nobody's ever done European tribes, either, and those are probably in many ways the best-studied—come to think of it East Asia technically has tribes as well, China is the Hua and Japan is the Yamato (God only knows what the Koreans' real name is, it's not Han).
The one exception I can think of is probably accidental: the Kzinti are essentially Zulus. Highly warlike, extremely loyal to their leaders, proud of courage to the point of forbidding even the showing of fear—all Zulu traits. Only I don't think Zulus were one of the African peoples that ever ate their enemies, I think that practice is more coastal.
Actually come to think of it, the only Indians they ever rip off are the Plains Indians. Leaving to one side that those are not all one thing, either—the Sioux were much less nasty than the Comanche, for instance—or the veracity of the versions they use, come on. There's much more interesting Natives on this continent. The Apache, for instance, can stand toe-to-toe with the Sioux in the Proud Warrior Race department, and Navajo culture's probably the most thoroughly studied in the country (mostly since, y' know, nobody wants their land, so they're still there). If the Hopi factions of Friendlies and Hostiles don't immediately suggest SFional possibilities to you, you're no son of mine.
Oh, wait, also, the Elites, in Halo, are actually based on a non-Native American tribe. Namely, the Dorieis. - I wonder, speaking of Africa and Native Americans, why don't aliens ever believe in witchcraft? I regret to inform you that you only disbelieve in it because the Catholic Church told you to; penalties for witch-hunting were imposed by the Council of Paderborn in 785 and that of Frankfurt nine years later.
It might be maintained that a highly technological society that could get into space wouldn't be superstitious, but I cordially invite you to step into a bookstore in this society. Notice the section consisting entirely of fourth-rate mysticism and quasi-Gnostic mystagoguery (often perjuriously labeled "metaphysics")? Is it really so hard to believe that, in a society that never had witch-hunting declared a heresy, those sham gurus would set up as witch-smellers rather than faith-healers? - It is perhaps occasion for some dark mirth, but I wonder how much of people putting up with BS aliens—the Na'vi, Xenomorphs, aliens who not only have sex with humans but children with them—is because they don't know anything about science? Several times, pogo-sticking through the minefield that is "talking about abortion on the internet", I have come across people who don't know the difference between fertilized and unfertilized ova—that is, between a haploid gamete and a diploid zygote. Which is, uh, 9th grade bio class, guys.
Please, please, please, find a sensible program for advancing science education—I mean one that's not married to bad fiscal or other policies, of course—and give them as much assistance as you can. If it helps people make better informed political choices, that'd be nice, I guess. But I'm really just hoping they won't sit still for codswallop baffle-gab passed off as science fiction.
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