Think different

Best example of loving the alien that I know is Paul Park’s _Celestis_. An alien who has a constructed human personality thanks to drugs begins to break down when she is kidnapped and the drugs are withdrawn. A very strange, beautiful book.

To be fair, I think that’s partly Gaiman’s point. The assorted gods and monsters of his universe are essentially creations of humanity, dependent on their faith for their fortunes – look at the pitiful fate of the Egyptian pantheon, particularly Bast, no longer needed and fading from memory. It makes sense that these creatures would be reflections of humanity.

The exception are the Endless (Dream, Death, Desire, etc), who Gaiman establishes to be above and beyond all others, both mortal and immortal. However, even the Endless are explained as archetypes that inform all of existence, forming the basis for all of humanity’s motivations – making us reflections of them. If you read the whole of the Sandman run, it’s clear that Gaiman’s biggest achievement was creating this internally consistent scheme that could include all the world’s religions and myths, while telling a story that both commented on and extended them.

The real question is, what would be the shape of non-human psychology? Is it possible for a human to understand non-human psychology, let alone to invent it? For example, the words you use to describe the demon in The Exorcist all describe human emotional states and reflect human judgements.

bq. Immortality somehow never seems to induce a radical change in psychology, and rarely is even convincingly shown to lengthen the time horizons of the characters.

“Paul McAuley”:http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/nonfiction/intpmca.htm has some interesting things to say about this.

bq. The problem of Tipler’s heaven — the problem with all secular heavens, including those of the virtual reality variety — is that he can’t imagine what it could be like to retain all the human attributes of one’s present personality yet also to be truly immortal. It’s a general problem in any SF dealing with transcendence in any serious kind of way, and of course the answer is that one cannot become immortal without becoming other than one’s self.

He deals with this in his Confluence trilogy, where an immortal human becomes very strange indeed …

Good idea, Rob.

Larry Niven, especially his early stuff like Neutron Star does aliens a lot better than he does humans. His aliens are properly odd. Browsing the US Amazon tells me that Neutron Star is now out of print, and the same short stories are now collected in Crashlander with additional material (which a US Amazon reviewer said shows how his writing has declined since). If such things matter, I should point out that even as a teenager, I found Niven’s politics explicitly right-wing. Also, IMO, he hasn’t written anything good since Ringworld in 1970.

RE: immortality, I think Tolkien does a fair job of showing how immortality changes things in his interactions between humans and elves–especially in the Silmarillion.

I think Gaiman suggests that the traits signified by the Endless are truly universal–so the idea that they would be reflected in humans and seem non-alien shouldn’t be surprising. I’m reluctant to say more becuase I’m not sure how far along you are, but I think Gaiman does at least show many of the extremes of human psychology–I’m thinking especially of the Cereal Convention for instance.

Basic problem in SF. And for that matter in philosophy of mind and in philosophical musings about AI or alien intelligences. The problem refracts back to your basic theories of or understandings of consciousness, sentience, language and so on. The more particular and contextual (biologically, historically, etc.) you assume those are, the less likely you are to think that a nonhuman intelligence can be represented in a way that a human intelligence could understand, let alone identify with. The more you tend to think that consciousness, thought, emotions are universals relatively little affected by time and space, the more likely you are to think that aliens or gods or immortals or computer intelligences will be essentially like humans except with fur or tentacles or superpowers or silicon.

i agree Paul’s observations though also, that this isn’t really the right question to ask of Sandman because Gaiman is quite specific that both gods and the Endless are reflections of or related to human consciousness, will and desire. He does play with the possibility that the Endless manifest differently to non-humans elsewhere, but he’s not really interested in that idea (which, I think, is an interesting one that I can’t think of too many SF/fantasy works taking up).

Oh and you can’t mention Sandman, without Sam Keith :D Cheeers!

Best inscrutable-alien story I know: Terry Carr’s “The Dance of the Changer and the Three.”

I think you have to distinguish between non-human *protagonists* and non-human *antagonists*.

Generally, one expects to more or less understand a protagonist’s motivations. On the other hand, lots of genre SF has non-human antagonists who do things just because that’s what they do. Their motivations aren’t really explored, because it’s accepted that those motivations are outside of human comprehension. By definition, though, it would be very hard (impossible?) to write a story from the viewpoint of a character whose motivations are absolutely incomprehensible to the reader. Kind of an immovable object vs. irresistable force paradox: either the motivations are comprehensible, or else it’s not really accurate to say that the book is presented from that character’s viewpoint.

In fact, there’s a common pattern of “incomprehensible (or at least unexplored) antagonist, who becomes pretty much human-like once defeated and turned into an ally of the protagonist”. I’m thinking in particular of E.E. Smith’s Lensman series, which might be considered the archetype of genre SF. In the Lensman series, it seemed to me that every book’s alien enemy, once defeated, became the protagonists’ main ally in the next book.

In general, I think the only way to present non-human psychology believably is if you can get the reader to say “yes, if I had seven tentacles, and had been raised from an egg by a semi-sentient plant, I might think that way, too”. It’s kind of like non-Euclidean geometry: altering *all* of Euclid’s postulates wouldn’t be very productive, but if you just change *one*, the results can be amazing.

“creating an alternate, consistent non-human psychology” describes the typical C.J. Cherryh novel (at least until about the mid 80s). Some of her novels are real tours de force, with multiple alien species interacting and the story told from the aliens’ point of view. I don’t think either of the examples cited so far represent her best work. For most enjoyable, I’d nominate the Regul (from Faded Sun), for most alien the menagerie of software life forms in Voyager in Night. Her most thoughtful aliens, though, are the ones that are most nearly human: the Azi (Serpent’s Reach, Port Eternity, Cyteen), and the colonists in Wave Without A Shore.

Ahem – Vernor Vinge _A Fire Upon The Deep_ and _A Deepness Upon The Sky_.

Look ’em up.

Yes, I can’t believe I forgot it. Vernor Vinge’s book is both excellent and an excellent treatment of alien intelligence.

Vinge – blah.
The Tines in Fire Upon the Deep are pretty good, but Deepness in the Sky doesn’t have alien aliens, it has a half-assed excuse to justify the aliens not being alien.
LeGuin’s Gethenians are interesting, though they’re not exactly alien. Some of the stories in her collection, Changing Planes, do deal with aliens who have drives that are comprehensible, but different (eg, the migrating people)

I find there’s a similar problem with the representation of artificial intelligences.

William Gibson does his best by presenting AIs as unable to communicate with humans except through human personae (hence they are actually inscrutable, you simply are fooled into thinking you understand them).

Iain Banks, on the other hand, to my mind blows it in EXCESSION by making the AIs appear just as banal and blathering as the humans.

A slightly more plausible representation of an advanced alien civilisation is presented, oddly enough, in Fred and Geoffrey Hoyle’s FIFTH PLANET; the point there is that the aliens won’t let you see much of themselves, and what’s there is incomprehensible (cf. last half-hour of 2001).

I’ll second both points on Vinge. The Tines are interesting, and so are the plant things, while the aliens in “Deepness in the Sky” are only alien when being described by humans. The parts of the novel told from their PoV show them as just people.

I’ve never read any of his books, but I know from my husband’s lectures that he would say Stanislaw Lem is the master of crafting a truly alien psychology.

What do you think about Babylon 5 Vorlons and Shadows? Are they non-human enough?

And A.C. Clarke monolith makers?

DSW

“Anyone want to venture opinions on Brian Aldiss, Poul Anderson, Ted Sturgeon, John Brunner, Norman Spinrad? Kate Wilhelm? Joanna Russ? Samuel R. Delany”

Good writers. I like them. You’re welcome.

And you are correct, Cordwainer Smith was an alien intelligence.

virtually all of the non-human characters so far seem to act like humans.

As I recall, Gaiman kinda mocks this himself by having the characters themselves sometimes refer to each other as anthropomorphic personifications. :)