Aliens in science fiction often aren’t science fictional at all.
Many “aliens” are—in the video format, literally—people in rubber suits (or foreheads, or ears). Think: Star Trek’s Klingons and Vulcans. They’re a bit unusual in appearance, but not necessarily in any other way. That’s fine where the story is as much allegory or satire as science fiction (below, I’ll touch upon trope aliens), but perfunctory aliens don’t always cut it when we’d like to broaden our horizons.
And isn’t one of the joys of SF broadening our horizons?
It’s been argued that truly alien aliens don’t work in fiction. If the author succeeds in portraying a truly alien alien, the reader can’t relate. Agreed: that disconnect can happen. It doesn’t have to, as we’ll see. Lots of SF involves truly alien aliens. To name a few (with plenty more examples to come):
• The Goa’uld of the Stargate SG-1 TV series.2
• The dinosaur-descended Yilanè of Harry Harrison’s West of Eden alternate-history trilogy.
• The pack-intelligent Tines of Vernor Vinge’s Zones of Thought series of novels.
In this article, we’ll look at alien aliens. Some aliens, literary or dramatic, will serve to illustrate more than one point, because nothing limits aliens to a single difference from humans. I’ll take some examples from my own writing; I have a pretty good idea why my aliens turned out the way they did.
If one difference is too few, should fictional aliens share any characteristics with humans? Often, yes. It’s entirely plausible that physical-world constraints and similar (not necessarily identical) evolutionary pressures will lead to common solutions.
But let’s not limit ourselves. Nonhuman intelligences need not be extraterrestrial, or even biological. Throughout this article, we’ll use alien in its broadest meaning of unfamiliar, rather than foreign or weird.
In a previous Analog article,3 I discussed literary tropes and their science-fictional variant.4 Briefly, a literary trope is a theme, such as heroes and quests, for which the storyteller relies upon preexisting audience familiarity and acceptance. Many an SF trope uses some aspect of science in a nonliteral way.
Am I dismissing alien life as mere trope?
No, but before we turn to the truly alien, let’s look at nonalien aliens. You know the type: humans thinly disguised. Such “aliens” have served as stand-ins for Cold War allegories (e.g., two neighboring worlds locked in a war whose origins no one really understands), racial parables (e.g., two species on the same world, one pointlessly oppressing the other), and straw men to advocate for (or against) birth control or euthanasia or gender equality or pretty much any sociological pattern. When the medium is visual, these aliens are humanoid in appearance—the directors not wanting to be too subtle. Another sign of a trope: aliens who are cross-fertile with humans or (like decades of lurid pulp-magazine covers) who find members of the other species sexually attractive.
I’ll assert there’s no plausible basis for such aliens. Parallel evolution, you say? True, humans and octopi evolved very similar eyes—but look how different we are in every other respect. We can’t bear each other’s children! Panspermia? Suppose common seeds of life did drift, eons ago, to both Earth and Mars (or Earth and your favorite exoplanet, real or fictional). Since then, there’s been a whole lot of evolution going on—on both worlds. I have more genes in common with a redwood or a rattlesnake than I could have in common with any extraterrestrial cousins.
Alien aliens: real SF. (I’d like to say meat-and-potatoes SF, but I’m guessing aliens aren’t edible, either.)
Social stand-in aliens? They’re tropes (not that there’s anything wrong with that).
Are all aliens in SF mere tropes? I’ll argue not.
Admittedly, only a few years ago, ours was the single known planetary system. The Extrasolar Planets Encyclopaedia5 now lists hundreds of other planetary systems, the numbers growing more or less daily. As instruments and search techniques improve, astronomers find smaller and smaller planets. The discovery of extrasolar planets much like Earth is expected within the next few years.
Wherever biologists look, Earth teems with life: deep within the rocks, in boiling-hot ocean-floor vents, in cooling ponds filled with the radioactive waste from nuclear power plants, and afloat high in the atmosphere. It appears that life—wherever it finds a foothold—evolves and prospers.
None of that is proof of extraterrestrial life. Evolution explains the richness of life but not its origin. The great leap from lifelessness to life remains unexplained by science; we simply don’t know how often that transition occurs.6
In our huge and ancient universe, I can’t dismiss the possibility of alien life elsewhere and elsewhen. And once we accept the possibility of extraterrestrial microbes, it’s within the realm of scientific speculation to consider those microbes evolving into more complex life.
Including potential peer species....
How should aliens look?
Well, most likely alien. Different. Even aliens who evolved on Earthlike planets.
That’s not to say aliens couldn’t share some anatomical features with terrestrial life. What works on Earth remains our only data point for what can work. That said, even terrestrial life shows more variety than some SF aliens.
Take four limbs. Yes, many earthly animals follow that design. Four limbs were inherited from humanity’s very primitive ancestors. Had we descended from starfish or octopi—and given a different timing of inopportune asteroid strikes, that might have happened—we would look a lot different.
To start simply, we can add or subtract limbs. Edgar Rice Burroughs, in his Barsoom (Mars) novels, gave the green Martians an extra pair of arms. The Puppeteers of Larry Niven’s Known Space future history have three legs; their two necks must do double-duty as arms.7 Robert A. Heinlein apparently drew his inspiration for the Bugs of Starship Troopers from earthly arachnids.
To read about beings who look and act like us, we hardly need science fiction.
So, Recommendation One: alien aliens look alien.
Barsoomians, Puppeteers, and Bugs have left and right sides—in that way, at least, they’re much like humans. Let’s crank up the symmetry dial....
Consider the Krulirim.9 A Krul’s three limbs serve as arms and legs. It has three sensory clusters, also equally spaced. Picture a Weber Kettle barbecue grill (the charcoal kind), with hands—though not quite human hands—at the end of the tripod limbs.
A Krul has no notion of left or right, of front or back. Its worldview is radially symmetric. Unless a Krul is asleep, you can’t sneak up on it. Nothing nearby is out of its sight. You or I might refer to an object by its distance to one side or another, and the distance in front or behind us—basically, Cartesian coordinates, centered on our own body. That doesn’t work for a Krul. So a Krul locates objects via polar coordinates: the distance from the body and the angle from a reference point.
“Aha!” you say. If a Krul is radially symmetric, how does it get that reference point? It needs an out-of-body reference point, so I gave Krulirim a magnetic sense. The reference for angular measurements is the bearing on the magnetic pole. (Terrestrial birds navigate magnetically. Why not Krulirim?) Two Krulirim comparing notes on the location of an object have to do trig in their minds—and how alien is that?
An unconventional body plan led to an unfamiliar worldview and required giving the aliens a sensory mode only weakly present, if at all, in most terrestrial life. The magnetic sense, in turn, ended up driving major elements of the plot—including Armageddon briefly foiled by humans interfering with that alien magnetic sense.
Some of the most memorable aliens in SF (speaking only of my memory, of course—your mileage may vary) come from worlds unlike Earth. Maybe that’s because the less Earth-like the alien home world, the harder it is to cast its denizens, even metaphorically, as people in rubber suits. Fictional humanoid aliens are so commonplace they tend to blur together.
Which very alien aliens spring to my mind?
• Mission of Gravity, by Hal Clement.10 The very-fast-spinning—and hence, far from spherical—planet Mesklin has surface gravity varying from a few gees at the equator to hundreds of gees at the poles. The centipede-like Mesklinites are the stars—practically the only characters—of the novel.
• Cranking up the gravity by orders of magnitude, we have Dragon’s Egg, by Robert L. Forward. The “egg” is a neutron star, and life has evolved on its surface. A cheela has the mass of a human in a flattened body the size of a sesame seed. Their tiny eyes can’t see light humans find visible, but rather use ultraviolet, even X-rays.
• A Deepness in the Sky, by Vernor Vinge. The “on-off” star—variable with a vengeance—regularly cycles its one inhabited planet from comfortable to cryogenic temperatures. On that world, the atmosphere freezes out on a regular basis. The native Spiders look somewhat like terrestrial arachnids and hibernate a bit like periodic cicadas (aka seventeen-year locusts).
• Titan, by John Varley. The main alien is a terrestrial (sort-of) world—with, for good measure, a plethora of alien species closer to human size running around her interior.
Plenty of excellent science fiction involves humanoid aliens. That said, I can’t help but be struck by how much more vivid in my memory these nonhumanoid aliens are.
Recommendation Two: exotic settings beget alien creatures beget unique circumstances beget memorability.
Okay, not Kansas, exactly, but somewhere homey. One of those myriads of “Class M” planets and moons with which the Star Trek universe is rife.
After all, plots sometimes demand that humans and aliens covet the same real estate.
So: can terrestrial planets give rise to alien aliens?
I can’t believe otherwise, considering the varied nature of life on Earth. It’s not much of a stretch to imagine intelligent dolphin-like creatures. They could evolve prehensile tongues and lips to remain streamlined and still be tool users. Or intelligent elephants—they have prehensile trunks. Or tool-using (and perhaps larger, thus flightless) parrots.11 Or dinosaurs. If a big rock hadn’t smacked into Earth, what might dinosaurs have given rise to by now?
Which fictional alien aliens could live on Earth? Who are the fictional alien aliens whose home worlds fictional humans can visit without protective gear?
• In A Fire Upon the Deep, Vernor Vinge brought us the delightful Tines, wolf-like creatures who—communing with ultrasound—form pack-like sapient group minds. Their technology remains primitive, disadvantaged by having to substitute jaws and cooperating mouths and muzzles for “hands.”
• Niven and Jerry Pournelle brought us the Fithp, wonderful elephant-like creatures (who coveted Earth), in Footfall. They brought us the even more wonderful, three-armed, greatly speciated, Moties of The Mote in God’s Eye. And we’ve already met Niven’s Puppeteers.
• Michael Flynn gave us the dimension-crossing, insectile Krenken (amid the Black Death in medieval Germany, no less) in Eifelheim.12
We can have our cake—Earth-like worlds, on which human characters freely roam and with whom readers can readily identify—and frost it, too, with alien aliens.13 I just wish that happened more often.
We’ve focused till now on physical differences from the human norm—but won’t aliens act alien, too? And if so, how?
To judge by sitcoms, human civilization revolves around mating. That might be an exaggeration—we permit comedy its tropes, too—but certainly reproduction, sexual gratification, gender roles, and bonding play major parts in how humans live.
What alternate reproductive schemes might aliens employ, and with what implications?
• Burroughs’s Barsoomians laid eggs, which they left in desert incubators.
• H. G. Well’s Martians (The War of the Worlds) reproduced asexually, by budding.
• Ursula K. LeGuin, in The Left Hand of Darkness, explored a society that is—all but a few days of the month—androgynous.
• In the Star Trek universe, male and female Vulcans—at all other times ultralogical and self-disciplined—turn violent every seven years (in a condition called pon farr) and must either mate or die.
• The “soft ones” of Isaac Asimov’s The Gods Themselves have three genders, each with a separate role.
Suppose, for a moment, that the pursuit of sex is the only thing that motivates us. Wouldn’t human behavior change if we went into heat, or changed genders, or (like much marine life) sprayed our gametes into the sea and let nature take her course?
But sitcoms notwithstanding, factors beyond the sex drive do influence our daily behavior. We may strive for power, knowledge, prestige, or personal safety. We may obsess about our families, jobs, or preferred musical groups. We—and entire nations—sometimes organize our lives around systems of religious, philosophical, and economic thought.
But back to sex. Sort of....
When human-alien sex pops into a story, I have problems willingly suspending my disbelief. The Star Trek universe has humans cross-fertile with Vulcans and Klingons. True, both alien races are humanoid—but so what? At the genetic level, people and paramecia must have more in common.
Nor are curious pairings in SF limited to sex or humanoids.
• Take the eponymous alien of Ridley Scott’s movie Alien. In its earliest lifecycle stage, the alien emerges from its egg. The newborn alien then invades a human host in whose body it gestates into a later life stage. Somehow this works despite the alien having acid for its blood. Somehow this compatibility arose without any prior known contact between species.14
• In the Stargate universe, snakelike parasites called the Goa’uld take control of the nervous systems of other intelligent species. Not only are multiple species (including humans) compatible as hosts, but a queen Goa’uld (in her host) can spawn swarms of Goa’uld larvae by mating with—among her other choices—a human.
• Bug-eyed monsters slobbering for nubile Earth women (who, at least on lurid magazine covers, encounter an astonishing rate of wardrobe malfunctions) were a staple of pulp-era SF.
How does evolution give rise across light-years to interspecies compatibilities? What common behavioral pattern or biochemical characteristics would lead either party to give relationships—whether fraternizing or parasitizing—a try?
Recommendation Three: if two species are biologically compatible—even as tasty snacks—explain how that interspecies compatibility is possible.
With examples—good and bad—behind us, let’s define terms. What are alien aliens?
As you might expect, I exclude caricatures of, and thinly disguised stand-ins for, humanity. I disqualify creatures drawn from our fears and phobias. The Other who seizes control of our bodies, ravishes our loved ones, or devours us from the inside out may employ SF tropes, but the resulting storyline often fits the genre of horror at least as much as it does science fiction.
But I still haven’t said what they are.
Alien aliens are beings whose description—physical, emotional, psychological, cultural, and in every other dimension—is grounded in their history, not ours. Their behaviors, capabilities, vulnerabilities, and limitations derive, ultimately, from their world (or other place) of origin, their evolutionary process, and their societal progression.
Alien aliens, in a word, are rooted in science, not self-examination.
Even, as we will see later in this article, aliens with whom we share common roots.
We label ourselves Homo sapiens sapiens—twice wise—but human behavior (and not merely in regard to sex) is often instinctual, emotional, habitual, reflexive, and otherwise not the product of coolly reasoned philosophy.
Humans and chimpanzees have 90%-plus genetic commonality (studies differ on the exact number), and anthropologists trace many “human” behaviors—from hugging to curiosity to territoriality and aggression—to inherited traits. Aliens descended from their own unique lineages would, one presumes, reflect in their behavior their genetic legacies.
Certainly authors have made that assumption. Aliens based on non-primate terrestrial examples include:
• The aforementioned reptilian Yilanè (Harrison had no living dinosaurs from which to extrapolate his aliens’ behavior).
• The felinoid Kzinti of Niven’s Known Space.
• The avian Gubru of David Brin’s Uplift War.
Recommendation Four: look to ancestral or analogous species to round out an alien’s personal and group behaviors.
Hive minds have fascinated people since before SF began.
I refer, of course, to that prototypical hive: that of bees. It’s long been noted that many types of insects—individually far from intelligent—exhibit elaborate group behaviors and build complicated structures. The group’s complexity arises out of interactions among the simple behaviors of individual elements.
It’s not only insects. Flocks, for example, exhibit behaviors that result from the unsophisticated reflexes of individual birds. Ditto, schools versus individual fish.
The overall phenomenon is called emergence: the complex behaviors in large systems that arise in the aggregate from simpler unit-level interactions among components. If you are of a computer-oriented frame of mind, you may prefer the term cellular automata. Either way, the fascinating thing is complexity arising out of simplicity and large numbers. One theory of human intelligence is that it emerges from the 100 billion neurons (and 100s of trillions of synapses) in each of our brains.
The emergence of complexity—and perhaps, intelligence—from large numbers of simple units is so fascinating that it may be the leading fictional premise for the arrival of an artificial intelligence.
The science-fictional (and sociological) question becomes: if complex behavior emerges from collectives of simple creatures, what sophistication might arise from collectives of more advanced creatures?
Once again, we have plenty of SF to choose from. We’ve already met Tines. Others include:
• the hive humans of Hellstrom’s Hive (Frank Herbert).
• the multispecies (and partially cybernetic) Borg of the Star Trek franchise.
• The replicators of Stargate SG-1.
Collectives and emergence—hive minds—are a great way to make alien aliens, even with humans as building blocks.
Some SF deals with aliens so alien as to defy human understanding. Such as:
• The Eschaton in Singularity Sky, by Charles Stross. In Greek philosophy, the eschaton is the end of everything, the ultimate destiny of the universe. The fictional eschaton is an artificial intelligence so advanced none can comprehend its thinking.15
• The Buggers/Formics of Ender’s Game.16 Humanity and this insectoid/hive species fight a war of extinction because humans and aliens cannot communicate. Humans cannot even convince the aliens we are capable of communication.
• The Beings of the Beyond, in Vinge’s aforementioned Zones of Thought novels. The farther one travels from the galactic core, the more advanced minds, natural and artificial, can become. Minds in the Beyond may seem good or evil, but—to a mere human, in any case—their capabilities and motivations are unfathomable. Humans who would try to understand Beyonders study applied theology.
Unknowable things in fiction aren’t new. They’re devices to move forward a plot involving beings we can understand: humans. Lots of fiction employs items we don’t understand but to which the characters must nonetheless react. The Maltese Falcon, in the book and movie of the same name, is such an object. Ditto the much sought after metal briefcase in the spy movie Ronin. Alfred Hitchcock called this plot device a MacGuffin.17 Once the story gets underway, you forget to wonder what the MacGuffin really is.
So: in Singularity Sky, we deal with the Eschaton’s human agents—them, we understand. In A Fire Upon the Deep, a Beyond being chases some characters into slow-witted parts of the galaxy, where readers encounter alien Tines whom we can understand.
Card’s Buggers are a more complicated case. Throughout Ender’s Game (the first book of a series, in fact two interlocking series) the Buggers are unknowable. In later books a hive queen has opened telepathic links with selected humans. The human story has progressed, and now the storyteller needs to establish a connection with the aliens. That step required destrangifying (like that word?) the alien.
Might the universe have aliens so alien that humans can never understand them? I don’t see why it couldn’t happen. But unknowable aliens in fiction generally aren’t only unknowable—they’re props. Tools of the authorial trade. MacGuffins.
Some might say, tropes.
Artificial intelligences will surely be alien—different in origin and nature from us.
In my communications-in-SF article, I opined that our lack of success in achieving AI may stem from anthropomorphism. Never mind that we can’t define intelligence, awareness, or consciousness. We characterize intelligence (per the Turing test) as communicating—hence (much unstated waving of hands) thinking—indistinguishably from humans. And so fictional artificial intelligences often think like humans and even strive to behave like humans.
The AI as Pinocchio....
Consider, for example, Mike (named after Mycroft Holmes, Sherlock’s smarter brother) in Robert A. Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. Or, more recently, Brittney the teeny-bopper AI in Richard A. Lovett’s “Sands of Titan” and sequels here in Analog. Both AIs simply emerged, bypassing our continuing lack of understanding of how we might implement an AI. Both AIs take humans as their role models.
(I’ve written stories with a similar premise—recognizing as I did so that I was committing a trope. When I wanted to avoid the trope, I transported Darwinian evolution into a computer lab, to breed a quite different AI.18)
There’s much to be said for exploring scenarios beyond (somehow) creating in our own image within silicon. If existence inside a computer or across a network ends up having parallels with the physical world, surely there will also be differences. Look how aquatic and land-based life vary. Look how creatures that fly differ from creatures that burrow. How different might an in-computer entity be from a biological entity evolved on a planet?
Adaptation to its unnatural—to humans—environment is but one way for an AI to be alien. Another is for the AI to be so advanced (think: beyond the Singularity19) that it can’t be represented directly to mere humans; the author keeps the AI character offstage. As an example we’ve already met: the Eschaton.
Even an AI that faithfully reproduces his programmer’s persona can be alien—when the programmer is an alien. That’s one premise of my InterstellarNet series of stories, many of them originally in Analog, about a radio-based interstellar trading community. Physical travel between stars being impractical, the humans and aliens alike transmit AIs to represent them. Surprise! The alien AIs are alien, and pursue alien agendas.
In Code of the Life Maker, James P. Hogan seeds an alien factory onto Titan—and the automation mutates. The automated machinery evolves, over eons, into an entire world-spanning AI- and robot-based ecosystem. The robots don’t know what to think when humans arrive. Neat premise. Neat story.
So AIs can be alien. Even alien alien.
We need also to consider human-derived aliens. Our potential successors, whether you prefer to label them hybrids, transhumans, or posthumans.
For example: uploads. That’s what you get by transferring a brain’s content into a computer. Why would anyone, assuming they could? To cheat death, perhaps—at least till medical science can achieve immortality or transfer minds from failing bodies into new ones.
Imagine: all one’s thought patterns, learned behaviors, and memories transcribed into a new form and format. However human that mind began, it has taken residence in an environment utterly alien to us Mark I humans.
The implications go far beyond the speed difference between synapses and transistors. Imagine speed-of-thought access to vast libraries. Imagine adding radar views of the world while losing some of the more familiar senses (say, smell). Imagine real-time access—sometimes authorized, sometimes hacked—to the net’s many peripherals, from Earth remote-sensing satellites to household power meters (to aerial combat drones?).
Surely the uploaded mind’s temperament, attitudes, and interests will diverge from those of meat minds. And so: surely also its behavior.
Intrigued? Wikipedia offers a very long list of uploads in fiction.20
Take, for example, Robert J. Sawyer’s The Terminal Experiment.21 As an exploration into the nature of the soul, a scientist uploads readouts of his own brainwaves into a computer—and his enemies start dying. Uh-oh.
Uploading is carried to an incredible (in a good way) extreme in Gregory Benford’s Eater—all the way into a black hole. And it’s worth mentioning this is an intelligent black hole. That’s quite the alien alien, too.
Assume we can upload a mind into a computer. Why not upload into a mobile computer? With wireless broadband, a robotic body can stay just as connected to the Internet as a mind bound to a data center. (But mobile or not, the uploaded mind operates without hormones and is immune to pheromones. Futurama’s Bender the robot will remain a trope—comedic if not science fictional.)
Let’s move on to a quite different hybrid: computer-extended biological humans. Like having nanites taking up residence in the brain, as in Greg Bear’s Blood Music and my Small Miracles. Carrying a library in your head or hearing voices—with agendas of their own—will make for a more-than-merely-human experience. Let alone if, ensconced within the brain, said nanites censor or invent how we experience the world, or pull the figurative levers of power.
Yet another scenario arises from the knowledge that we’re at the dawn of an age of genetic engineering. After a few years, decades, or centuries pass, how far might gengineered humans diverge from present-day norms? Which is to ask: how alien might our descendants become?
• The changes may be subtle, as exhibited by our Sleepless betters in Nancy Kress’s Beggars in Spain.
• Or overt, altering us for alien environments, as in the space-adapted (four-armed and legless) quaddies of Lois McMaster Bujold’s Falling Free.22
• Or psychologically revealing, as when the transhumans of Mike Brotherton’s Dragon’s Star keep reshaping their bodies.
We’ve touched on several ways to make an alien alien—and several methods might apply at the same time. As an illustration, let’s take a peek at the Gw’oth.23
Setting. We’ll begin with Jm’ho, the Gw’oth home world. I took as my starting point Europa: an icebound moon of Jupiter. Jm’ho has—just as astronomers now believe to be true of Europa—a world-spanning ocean trapped beneath a thick sheath of ice. Again mimicking the Jupiter system, the gas-giant planet around which Jm’ho orbits exerts intense tidal forces upon its inner moons. The ceaseless flexing keeps Jm’ho seismically active and its ocean liquid. Above the ice lies deadly vacuum.
Biochemistry. Sunlight can’t penetrate the ice, and so photosynthesis isn’t the basis of the ecosystem. Instead, life on Jm’ho depends on chemosynthesis, on harvesting energy and resources from minerals and hydrogen sulfides that endlessly upwell from the abyssal depths. A similar biome is found along the hydrothermal vents beneath Earth’s oceans. Life on Jm’ho hugs the vents and undersea volcanoes; everywhere else, the world ocean is lifeless, effectively a desert.
Evolution. Along Earth’s hydrothermal vents, tube worms are at the top of the food chain. On Jm’ho, chemosynthetic life has evolved further. Some worms evolved to hunt in packs. They developed vision optimized toward the red end of the human-visible spectrum. (Why and how, in the inky depths, could they have any sight? They see in infrared, the better to discern ocean vents and the fainter heat of prey. Their vision gradually expanded to exploit the sporadic reddish glow of fresh lava from volcanic eruptions.)
Some pack-hunting worms also evolved the ability to connect nervous systems. In such linkages, they extended the resolution and angular separation of their primitive IR-sensitive triangulation. From such worm colonies, over time, evolved starfish-like hunters: the immediate ancestors of the Gw’oth.
Physiology and appearance. A Gw’o loosely resembles a starfish crossed with an octopus. The Gw’o’s five flexible extremities are equally spaced around a disklike central mass.24 Each tubular tentacle—tubacle—harkens back to the Gwo’s ancestral, free-ranging tube worms. From the mouth inward, arrayed in consecutive rings around the tube’s inner surface, are teeth, eyes, ears, and the myriad chemoreceptors for taste and smell. Shared organs, including most of the central nervous system, reside in the central disk. Flattened and with its tubacles outstretched, a Gw’o spans about two-thirds of a meter.
Sensory apparatus and communications. A Gw’o’s vision, compared to a human’s, is biased toward infrared; it can’t see past blue. Its hearing and speech coevolved with echolocation. Befitting a carnivore at the apex of a chemosynthetic ecology, a Gw’o has keen senses of taste and smell. Complex communication relies upon modulated sound, but a Gw’o, like an Earthly squid, conveys emotions—sometimes involuntarily—with color patterns on its skin.
Locomotion. Gw’oth both swim and scuttle along the ocean floor. To swim, they draw in water through an orifice in the central mass and expel the water through their tubacles. That is, a Gw’o is jet-propelled. It steers, veers, and spins by aiming and reaiming its tubacles.
Reproduction. Gw’oth have genders—but neither gender roles nor sex. Females deposit egg clusters within breeding chambers in the Jm’ho analogue to coral reefs. Males later fertilize the egg clusters. Some social groupings limit breeding-chamber access to individuals of suitable prestige. At birth, the immature, not-yet-sentient newborns scatter; those few spawn that manage to elude predators and to mature are accepted into Gw’oth society.25
Group minds. To make the Gw’oth really alien (and to advance a plot), I had a tiny fraction of the population retain the ancestral ability to link nervous systems. When Gw’oth link minds this way, they form a biological computer: a Gw’otesht. With their memories and engrams imprinted into the group consciousness—a limited sort of upload—members of a Gw’otesht experience a degree of life after death.
A Gw’otesht of enough members can be scary smart....
Technology. With prehensile and opposable tubacles to manipulate objects, Gw’oth are natural tool users. Living underwater, alas, they’ve been without fire to smelt ores or forge metals; for most of Gw’oth history they’ve had only stone tools. Their communities of stacked-stone buildings hug the serpentine ocean-floor vents. He who controls the life-giving vents holds all power; Gw’oth government tends toward dictatorship—just as the pharaohs used their control of the life-giving Nile to maintain a water-monopoly empire in the Egyptian desert.
And then some enterprising Gw’oth learn to fashion watertight leather suits, and to circulate water to and from the suits with leather hoses pumped by leather bellows. And go exploring above the ocean through (once again, Europa-like) fissures in the world-girding ice. And first encounter stars.
And everything changes....
Adaptations for exotic environments and alternative body plans. Unique senses and different genders. Group minds and AIs, uploads and gengineered transhumans. And yet, we have only scratched the surface.
How else might aliens be really alien?
Through a novel psychology, perhaps, as in Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life,” whose alien heptapods have a mindblowingly unique perception of reality. Or through alternate organizing principles for society. Or because they’ve been enhanced/altered from dolphins, as in Brin’s Uplift series. Or by being immortal shape-shifters, à là Joe Haldeman’s Camouflage.26 Or maybe as shapeshifting cyborgs, as we meet from time to time in the TV series Fringe.
Or, or, or....
It would take entire books to explore the spectrum of possible aliens, and ways to craft them. Books such as these:
• Aliens and Alien Societies: A writer’s guide to creating extraterrestrial life-forms, Stanley Schmidt.
• Barlowe’s Guide to Extraterrestrials: Great Aliens from Science Fiction Literature, Wayne Douglas Barlowe, Ian Summers, and Beth Meacham.
• Beyond Human: Living with Robots and Cyborgs, by Gregory Benford and Elisabeth Malartre.
[“Alien Aliens: Beyond Rubber Suits” first appeared in Analog (April 2013).]
~~~
“Alien Aliens” merits more than the usual bit of explanation.
My most popular novels are the interstellar epic Fleet of Worlds series, a collaboration with Larry Niven. Fleet of Worlds (2007) itself, the opener of the series—not that Larry and I had a series in mind when we wrote Fleet—was a Sci Fi Essential title (from back in the day the network was known as Sci Fi, not SyFy), a featured title of the Science Fiction Book Club, and a finalist for the prestigious Prometheus Award. Books in the series have been translated into Chinese, Czech, German, Greek, Italian, Korean, Polish, and Russian. And any novel that led to four sequels presumably has something going for it. Clearly, something from the series belonged in this collection.
Whereupon we run smack dab into my no excerpts from novels policy....
While the Fleet novels take place within Larry’s overarching Known Space future history, my contributions included introducing a (very) alien species, the Gw’oth. Aliens who, as you’ve seen, I had discussed at length in the “Alien Aliens” essay. Problem solved—with the bonus of a cameo performance in the essay by another of my alien species: the Krulirim from Moonstruck, my second novel.
There’s yet further synergy here, because “Alien Aliens” comes from a series of its own. Between 2011 and 2016, I produced about a dozen essays for the fact side of Analog Science Fiction and Fact.27 These pieces explore the (possible) science underpinning much SF along with a survey of how SF has used (and too often abused) that science. The essay series explored such topics as time travel, faster-than-light travel, artificial intelligence, and (as you’ve seen) credible aliens.
Nor was just “Alien Aliens” well-received; seven articles in the “science behind the fiction” series went on to become reader-poll finalists, while one, “Faster Than a Speeding Photon: The Why, Where, and (Perhaps the) How of Faster-Than-Light Technology,” won its year’s annual poll for fact article. Integrated, updated, and expanded, the essay series became my lone-to-date nonfiction book: Trope-ing the Light Fantastic: The Science Behind the Fiction.
Now, following up on the passing InterstellarNet mention in the just-concluded article, I give you....