Fictional aliens must be different than humans

[Guest]

Inscrutable, Inhuman, Impossible-seeming.

Forget catgirls and Klingons, then go read some Lovecraft. Then follow it up with C.A. Smith. Throw in Lem's Solaris, Master's Voice and The Invincible for good measure. For ecosystems, Kir Bulychev's "The Pass" and "The Settlement" (not sure if that's how those titles were translated in English), also Huberath's "Vatran Auraio", if you can find it in English. You want to be realistic about your aliens, that's where you start. Then make them weirder.  

Edited May 29, 2019 by Guest

[magnemoe]

44 minutes ago, Dragon01 said:

Inscrutable, Inhuman, Impossible-seeming.

Forget catgirls and Klingons, then go read some Lovecraft. Then follow it up with C.A. Smith. Throw in Lem's Solaris, Master's Voice and The Invincible for good measure. For ecosystems, Kir Bulychev's "The Pass" and "The Settlement" (not sure if that's how those titles were translated in English), also Huberath's "Vatran Auraio", if you can find it in English. You want to be realistic about your aliens, that's where you start. Then make them weirder.  

Problem is that animals are defined by physic, tentacle monsters get issues out of water and scaled up. 
Elephants don't really count

Agree about weird however, they are not based on our evolution, does exoskeletons scale up well, largest on earth are crabs and hummers. 
You could also have other features like one large eye and two small ones for distance measurement. 

[Guest]

"Huge tentacle monsters" is one Lovecraft's story. Not a very good one, either, by his own admission (and besides, this particular example was in water). He wrote a lot stuff that was far more bizarre than that. Physics is not much of a limit, TBH, you can get arbitrarily large creatures if you ditch the basic assumptions Earth's biology works with (for instance, nobody says you need a skeleton at all, either exo or endo).

If you're basing your aliens on marine life, they're not weird enough. It may not have recognizable eyes at all. You're talking something that doesn't look like anything that could be found on Earth.

Edited May 29, 2019 by Guest

[magnemoe]

1 minute ago, Dragon01 said:

"Huge tentacle monsters" is one Lovecraft's story. Not a very good one, either, by his own admission (and besides, this particular example was in water). He wrote a lot stuff that was far more bizarre than that. 

If you're basing your aliens on marine life, they're not weird enough. It may not have recognizable eyes at all. You're talking something that doesn't look like anything that could be found on Earth.

Here we disagree a bit, eyes are a bit like other sensors, you need an large enough lens and an sensor array behind it, you want to armor this as its your primary sensor. 

Assuming we are talking about intelligent tool using aliens here so they need to be fairly long lived and large enough to hold an large brain. 

[Guest]

Not necessarily on all counts. Eyes are a bit like other sensors, yes, in that you can combine many small ones and get the benefits of a single large one. There's seldom one single way of doing things. Honestly, of that there are examples even among Earth's animals. Not to mention that's assuming it has eyes at all (also untrue even in case of some terrestrial organisms). Photosensitivity of some sort is fairly likely, even roughly in the same spectrum (UV radiation starts being ionizing fairly quickly, but shorter wavelengths give better resolution, so it's best to stop, like human vision, just short of UV), but it likely won't resemble human vision organs too closely. Nobody says it's going to be their primary sensor, either. Light is pretty useless in deep water, for example.

If it can transmit information to its offspring, it doesn't need to live long. Besides, "long" is relative (maybe in its environment surviving even 5 minutes takes an intelligent being?). Also, it doesn't need a distinct "brain" at all - it can do its thinking by other means. It doesn't even need to have anything comparable to cells, nevermind tissues. Some sort of component specialization is likely, but what if, for instance, it can rearrange its internal structure? Human brain is not necessarily the most volume-efficient way of doing what it does, either (though it's probably fairly close), so any assumptions based on that are also misguided. 

Edited May 29, 2019 by Guest

[Spacescifi]

I also agree that aliens may not need writing. It just depends on how efficiently they can spread ideas.

 

If they are visual telepaths that can craft dream like worlds and transmit them across distances to each other, then yeah. Writing is no longer always necessary.

Except for historical records. Also business.

[Guest]

Historical records and business are all human inventions. If aliens don't have writing, their society won't need it. What if they remember, in some "genetic memory" equivalent, everything that has ever happened to any particular alien's ancestors? They might live long enough and be "mentally" capable enough that interstellar travel could be invented and developed by just one of them, or, combined with the previous example, one line of descent could be working on it for generations, each armed with all their ancestors' discoveries.

If you don't have an unbound imagination like that of Lem, Huberath, Lovecraft or C.A.Smith, it's safer to stick to writing humans. It's far too easy to trip over humanizing what should, by all accounts, be completely, utterly inhuman. And if you think you overcame that, make sure you're not just working off diverse, but ultimately limited Earth's biosphere. You know you're on your way to good aliens when you look at Earth's more bizarre deep sea organisms and think "nice, but a bit pedestrian".

Edited May 29, 2019 by Guest

[Spacescifi]

28 minutes ago, Dragon01 said:

Historical records and business are all human inventions. If aliens don't have writing, their society won't need it. What if they remember, in some "genetic memory" equivalent, everything that has ever happened to any particular alien's ancestors? They might live long enough and be "mentally" capable enough that interstellar travel could be invented and developed by just one of them, or, combined with the previous example, one line of descent could be working on it for generations, each armed with all their ancestors' discoveries.

If you don't have an unbound imagination like that of Lem, Huberath, Lovecraft or C.A.Smith, it's safer to stick to writing humans. It's far too easy to trip over humanizing what should, by all accounts, be completely, utterly inhuman. And if you think you overcame that, make sure you're not just working off diverse, but ultimately limited Earth's biosphere. You know you're on your way to good aliens when you look at Earth's more bizarre deep sea organisms and think "nice, but a bit pedestrian".

 

As I said in the original post, all I require of fictional aliens is that they act different than your average person. I do not have to jump through the mental olympics you might want to jump through.

As this is fiction, and I know that humans want an entertaining a piece of fiction.

Jumping through the hoops you stated.is not necessary to do this.

Humanoids, even if you may not prefer such a design because you do not think it is 'realistic' enough, is a proven design that works. I have also noticed that some who believe aliens actually exist share your sentiments about fictional aliens.

As for me, to start from scratch making alien designs is harder, and I see no benefit personally to myself in doing so.

Edited May 29, 2019 by Spacescifi

[Guest]

If you want realism, you have to make an effort. Good SF takes boatloads of creativity and a solid grasp of science. Humanoids are cheap and unrealistic. Aliens are alien, humans are human-like. That doesn't mean they're not diverse. But they're relatable, and much easier to work with than realistic aliens. You can even have them come from another planet, assuming they had a way to get there at some point.

If you don't want alien, don't do aliens. Have humans isolated from the rest long enough to form a different culture. May be vastly different, in fact If you want different behavior, just have a look at various Earth's cultures and beliefs. Everything, from attitudes about nudity and clothing, social mores, taboos, table manners, morality and anything else you can think of, you can change. Sexuality in general, if you can handle it well, is a good way of making an utterly foreign culture, because Christian dogmas about those things are so ingrained in western-influenced cultures (that is, most of extant ones. Even Islam basically subscribes to the same mores, and it propagated it though India and even China) that most people don't give them a second thought. Try to find things in your own life that you consider "obvious" (like, as I said, wearing of clothes), and think about how it'd be if they were different. There's a lot that you can explore, but whatever you do, make them entirely convinced that theirs is the only proper way to live.  

You can even have genetically modified humans adapted to a different planetary environment. Highly speculative, and would require jumping through some hoops to explain (experiments by actual, unseen aliens?), but it could make for a nice reveal, while allowing you to have "humanoid aliens". Generally, if it looks like a human and thinks like a human, it's somehow descended from humans, or humans from it (for another fun twist).

Edited May 30, 2019 by Guest

[mikegarrison]

The problem with human aliens is that there is an unbroken chain of evolution going back about 4 billion years on this planet. Even if you believe life here was seeded, any process of natural evolution would have to rewind all that way back.

I've seen authors who try to handwave it, like when David Weber had humans being the descendants of alien mutineers from about 50,000 years ago. In that story he claimed earth was seeded with life from the same planet that humans actually evolved on, so that's why they seem related. But it doesn't actually work, because there is no way evolution on some other planet would have produced humans that could have ended up so close to what developed on Earth that we were confused about homo sapiens being closely related to the other homo species.

People seem to think that aliens would have to be something like us, because we are such chauvinists that we are sure we are nearly optimally designed. Ha. A shark is a lot more optimally designed than humans are, which is why sharks have been around for 450 million years while humans have only been around for about 0.1 million years. Trees have been around for 360 million years, and some individuals can live more than 5000 years. They blow humans away in terms of optimization.

Edited May 30, 2019 by mikegarrison

[kerbiloid]

3 hours ago, mikegarrison said:

The problem with human aliens is that there is an unbroken chain of evolution going back about 4 billion years on this planet. Even if you believe life here was seeded, any process of natural evolution would have to rewind all that way back.

Or just a highly developed civilization using hums as seed material for 20 000 years.
On some planet the descendants of the kidnapped humans could technically evolve and visit the Mother Earth.

Or, say, some lost legion was actually kidnapped, and there is a Roman Empire of Fomalhaut.

Then there can be human aliens, just not older than ~20..30 k years.

For us - human aliens, for them - human pets.

Will the Real Aliens take somebody's side?
Probably, no. They will make bets.

For me, it's much more realistic theory than thinking forests and flying whales.

Edited May 30, 2019 by kerbiloid

[mikegarrison]

1 hour ago, kerbiloid said:

For me, it's much more realistic theory than thinking forests and flying whales.

I don't know any stories about flying whales, unless you count Leviathan (and that's a case of genetic engineering, not alien evolution). But I've read some pretty good thinking forest stories.

 

Edited May 30, 2019 by mikegarrison

[kerbiloid]

1 hour ago, mikegarrison said:

I don't know any stories about flying whales, unless you count Leviathan

At least, The Wind Whales of Ishmael and in some sense the Hitchhiker's Guide.

1 hour ago, mikegarrison said:

But I've read some pretty good thinking forest stories.

Yes, but I've never seen them irl. While there is a lot of people settled by will or not exactly by, on another landmass.
Wait... This forum... Oh...

Edited May 30, 2019 by kerbiloid