Alien Concerns

I'm going to be a little bit controversial here. I have, for some time, been speculating - mentally as it were, - that Science Fiction, as a genre, has been a bit lacking in imagination.

Now this may seem a strange thing to say about a genre whose billion-year history has been almost entirely founded on the power of imagination (and, if ugly rumour is to be believed, very strong liquor); but hang on - or, if you've been watching the latest series of Game of Thrones, Hold the Door.

I am talking specific cases here.

Let's take aliens.

Now, clearly, we have progressed, alien-wise, from the image above; although I think the "Green Humanoid" style of 1950's alien is actually due a comeback. Just as Art Deco retains a kind of timeless charm, and retro chic is, in the world of Fashion, actually a Thing, so Retro Aliens will, at some point in the near future become the must-have sci-fi accessory. Ray guns, too. All these high-tech weapons systems are all very well, but when it comes to vapourising clean-cut 1950's American guys, the good old fashioned ray-gun is still the sidearm of choice for your discerning extra-terrestrial.

Aliens no longer say "Take me to your Leader", either; which is almost certainly a good thing, given our current leaders. Any inhabitant of the planet Acti-Blogzoid III who has travelled untold millions of light-years from his home only to be introduced to David Cameron, is going to be reaching for the photon torpedoes before the bald guy with the specs has even got his Moog turned on in order to play the cute little five-note greeting tune. And that's quite leaving aside what might potentially happen if said aliens were to land in the America of the near future. Donald Trump could probably start a pitiless thousand-year intergalactic war without even leaving the house; and even if our aliens weren't bent upon the absolute annihilation of the Human race when they arrived, they probably would be after fifteen minutes sipping Fairtrade Lattes with the Hillster.

I digress - which is a pretty good trick, when I hadn't actually got to the point in the first place. The chief complaint I have about a lot of the aliens with whom I am presented by modern sci-fi is that they are still actually too human. We actually haven't progressed, in a lot of ways, from the original paradigm of the vaguely humanoid "Gollum-with-tweaks" model of aliendom. The Sci-fi crowd often explain this by reference to something called "Parallel Evolution": that is to say, evolution seeks successful ways of doing things, and when it finds them, it repeats them. A logical extension of this theorem suggests that this means Jose Mourinho isn't all that unique after all; but rather that he might have independently evolved upon every earth-like planet which carries the natural conditions for life. This is a thought so terrifying that I'm actually going to get serious.

This tendency toward human-like characteristics in aliens is even more true when we come to the matter of alien psychology and motivations. Classically, sci-fi accepts two possible alien motivations for visiting Earth:

1) They want to invade Earth and enslave/kill/eat/sell cleaning products to/ the human race.

2) They are fantastically advanced and enlightened and want to help us be the same way by educating us about the evils of greenhouse gases and encouraging us in the direction of vegan cuisine (no pun intended).

Both of these, while debatable from a moral point of view (have you ever tried vegan sausages?), are essentially very human impulses. Sci-Fi can't seem to get away from the image of aliens as being, well, people in costumes. The aliens in Star Wars are a good example; even Chewbacca. Yes, he may be an eight-foot-tall fur covered monster who communicates by roaring; but he experiences what are obviously and recogniseably human emotions, even if most of them are homicidal.

Even more serious and considered sci-fi falls into this trap. Take, as a random example the classic duo, Niven and Pournelle. They once had the Earth invaded by aliens who looked like baby elephants. They looked like baby elephants, and behaved like, well, Nazis. Humans. And Niven and Pournelle, in another novel, created an alien race called Moties, who were so human that I'm convinced one of them is running the chip shop next door to my flat.

Just think about this for a moment, people. Imagine that aliens suddenly arrived in earth orbit. Now, for one thing, they would most likely be far more technologically advanced than us, because they would have developed interstellar travel. Let's say they are, for the sake of argument, two thousand years ahead of us. Now imagine an ordinary Roman citizen from the year AD15, sitting in the studio audience of, for instance, The Jeremy Kyle Show. They wouldn't understand the language, they wouldn't understand the surroundings and they certainly wouldn't understand the behaviour. That's you, in an alien spaceship. Except that the guests on Jezza are the same species as our poor, civilised Roman, so he would at least recognise the limbs and possibly some of the body language, and will have at least some shared instincts. You, on the other hand, an honoured guest on a vessel crewed by beings who evolved on a different planet, and have entirely different experiences, imperatives and evolutionary drives to you; you probably wouldn't know their arse from their elbow - quite literally - much less why the big green alien was now engulfing the slightly smaller purple alien with its, well, bits, and what all the high-pitched squeaking was about.

Face it. If aliens actually do come to earth, they are likely to be so different to us that we will quite simply lack the capability to understand the slightest thing about them. Comprehend their emotions? What if they don't have emotions as we recognise them? Understand their motivations? What if they are motivated by a set of morals and guidelines which bear no resemblance whatsoever to anything that has ever evolved on earth? In that case, they are likely to be, quite simply, inscrutable; their actions apparently random and inexplicable; their needs, wants and desires (if, indeed, they have any) beyond our comprehension. And if they are also hugely more technologically advanced than us as well?

Arthur C Clarke once remarked that any sufficiently advanced technology is, from the point of view of the beholder, indistinguishable from magic. Likewise, would any sufficiently advanced race be, from our point of view, indistinguishable from, for example, Gods?

That was the type of alien I wanted to write about.

So I did. You can find out more here.