Ruminations of an Old Goat

This is my final column of 2009. Where did the year go? For that matter, where did the entire first decade of the 2000s go? It seems only a short time ago I was working hard to make sure the world didn't come to an end because of the Y2K bug yet suddenly find myself a few days short of the year we make contact.

By the way, I never used the phrase "Y2K bug" in my work. Why? Because it wasn't a bug! A bug is a mistake in the code. Using two digit years was a choice made by guys who never imagined their programs would be in use 30+ years later and who didn't have cheap, plentiful computer storage space like we do now. Sorry, just wanted to get that out of my system. Oh, and the world wasn't in danger of coming to an end, either. Prior to the current "climate change" junk, that was the biggest hoax pulled on an unsuspecting public.

Let's get back to 2010, the year we make contact. It's obvious we're not going to be sending any expeditions to other planets in 2010. If we're going to make contact with someone, they're going to have to come to earth. I hope you'll forgive me if I don't hold my breath waiting for that to happen. But if man did meet aliens, what would they be like? Science fiction has struggled with that idea for longer than science fiction has been recognized as a genre.

The earliest alien invasion story I know of is H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds. I think most of us know the gist of the story. The Martians land, put together their tripods, grab their heat rays and the empire of man ends in a matter of days. Wells wasn't writing about aliens, though. He was writing social commentary about just how fragile civilization was. Mankind spent thousands of years building what the Martians destroyed in the blink of an eye. The Martians do not appear as characters, leaving the reader to define the race. In the end, we see them as highly intelligent and vastly cruel because those are the attributes we'd give to humans who did the same thing.

Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote about alien races, particularly those of Barsoom, aka Mars. Burroughs' aliens weren't really alien, though. They were simply humans with some superficial biological differences or, in the case of the green Martians, they were tall, multi-limbed, green, cruel humans. And, when you stop to think about it, a whole lot of science fiction stories feature aliens who are simply different-looking humans.

A surprising number of pioneering names in science fiction either never wrote about aliens or only rarely wrote about them. It's been a long, long time since I read anything by Isaac Asimov, but most of his novels feature a vast, sprawling human empire without an alien race to be found. I sometimes wonder if Asimov didn't create his three laws of robotics so he could have an "alien race" that was logical, created to fit into human society yet distinctly non-human. Yes, Asimov did create an actual alien race in The Gods Themselves but that's the only truly alien race I recall him creating.

In his early works, Robert Heinlein had some alien races. He rarely used his Venusians, but Heinlein's Martians featured prominently in a couple of his books; Double Star and, without even appearing once, Stranger in a Strange Land. Oddly enough, I don't recall the Martians playing any real part in the novel Red Planet. Though his Venusians and Martians were not simply humans in another form, Heinlein never used those races as major characters. Most often Heinlein simply avoided writing about aliens at all.

As both Asimov and Heinlein were hitting their stride as writers, science fiction was showing up on the big screen, too. While some of the movies were quite good for their time, I don't recall seeing any truly alien aliens. Generally, you had aliens who had built something incredible and left -- Forbidden Planet -- or aliens who attacked earth without warning -- Earth Versus the Flying Saucers -- or aliens who were nearly godlike in comparison to us -- The Day the Earth Stood Still (the real one, not the crap remake).

The 1960s ushered in the "new wave" of science fiction but I never was quite sure what the critics meant by that. Maybe they meant the writing was getting better? I don't know. A quick check of the Hugo and Nebula awards for best novel doesn't show too many novels featuring aliens. Of the 10 Hugo award winning novels, only Way Station, Clifford Simak's 1964 winner, and This Immortal, Roger Zelazny's 1966 winner, feature any non-human characters. The aliens in Way Station were minor characters and came across as different-looking humans rather than truly alien. Having never read This Immortal, I can't comment on Zelazny's aliens. I have read a lot of Zelazny, though, I recall only a few aliens, all of whom seemed to fit the "different-looking human" mold.

We fare a bit better with the Nebula, which was first awarded in 1965. Out of five awards in the 1960s, two went to novels with aliens; Delany's The Einstein Intersection and Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness. Major characters in both books were aliens. Actually, all of the characters in Delany's book were aliens. Alas, I never could get into The Left Hand of Darkness and could never get past the first Delany novel I ever tried to read, Dahlgren. So I can't comment on just how alien the aliens are in these two books.

Meanwhile, movies and television did not give us any particularly alien aliens. Star Trek abounded with aliens, but they were all recognizable as variant humans. I honestly can't think of anything else on the screen that featured aliens in large roles.

I'm going to skip forward to the present because there's just too much between the 1960s and now. Suffice it to say, it remains rare to run across truly alien aliens in either print or on the screen (large or small). Of all of the aliens I've read about in the last 30 to 40 years, I think John Ringo's Posleen, first seen in A Hymn Before Battle are the most truly alien race I've run across in a novel. I've only read the first book in the series, though, so perhaps that changed. But it's worth noting that none of the aliens are actual characters in the book. Ringo can simply give us a glimpse of the aliens' behavior without bothering to explain or rationalize it.

On the screen, both large and small, alien races have continued to fall into the same three categories I listed above, though I suppose I should add primitive-yet-superior-to-humans tree-huggers now that Avatar has been released.

The point of all of this is that most people think of aliens when they think of science fiction. Yet how often do aliens actually show up in science fiction? One of my all-time favorite authors, Lois McMaster Bujold, hasn't had a single alien in any of her novels. David Weber writes of vast, star-spanning empires but not of aliens. He did write about aliens in the four book Prince Roger series he wrote with John Ringo, but unlike the Posleen, many of the characters in the four novels are aliens. Those aliens were no more "alien" than the green Martians Burroughs wrote about nearly 100 years ago.

And let's be honest, this all makes sense. It's not easy to have truly alien characters while still writing a coherent story. So let me end with a question for you. Have you ever run across a truly alien character in a science fiction book/movie/TV show and was the book/movie/show worth the time you spent on it?

Inquiring minds want to know.