On Sun, 13 Dec 2020 14:45:09 +0000, "Andrew Long - <xxxxxx@me.com>
wrote:

>> On 13 Dec 2020, at 14:09, Jeff Zeitlin <xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:

>> Question before the house: Consider the SF that you've read: Which
>> aliens do you feel are the best examples of what John W. Campbell said
>> he wanted in aliens, and how would you describe them in e.g., a
>> Contact! article in the old JTAS?

>> (Campbell is said to have demanded of his authors, "Show me an alien
>> that thinks _as good as_ a man, or _better than_ a man, but not _like_
>> a man.”)

>An invidious task, at best. Those authors who could sufficiently distance
>themselves from their humanity to do it, mostly found that fans didn’t
>connect with the alien viewpoint. We *say* we want to be challenged, but do
>we really? We say that it would be terrible if everyone was the same… well,
>except for them, over there… and I’m not sure about *them*, either...

This is a good point, and one of the reasons that I contend that the
so-called "rubber suit problem" isn't actually the problem most people
think it is.

Nevertheless, I think you overstate the case in the "other direction" - an
alien doesn't have to think like a human in order for a human to 'connect'
with them in literature; it merely has to have behaviors and priorities
that we can recognize in ourselves.

>However, in no particular order….
>Kif

Your example of the Kif - in fact, pretty much all of the oxygen-breathing
races from Cherryh's Compact Space - are good ones; none of them would
respond to many situations the way humans do, and their priorities are
certainly not ordered the way humans would order them, even where they
overlap - yet one can 'connect' with them, which is why the stories work.

>(I’d include K’nnn in the list but we never get close enough to really observe them)

It's a bit more difficult, but perhaps not entirely impossible, with the
methane-breathers, and part of that is definitely that we don't get as
close exposure to them as we do to the Hani, the Kif, the Mahendosat, or
even the Stsho (who are perhaps the most alien (to us) of the
oxygen-breathers).

>Piersons Puppeteers
>Kzinti

Ditto with the Pierson's Puppeteers and the Kzinti from Niven's Known
Space; there is enough commonality of concept that we can relate to them,
yet it's fairly evident that they are not humans, not even humans in rubber
suits.

>Valentine Michael Smith’s Martians (not withstanding the point about K’nnn above, we get to see them through Mike’s eyes)

This is an interesting one; the question we need to ask is whether we're
seeing the Martians through human eyes, or are we seeing them through a
human interpretation of Martian eyes? In other words, is Valentine Michael
Smith really _human_ in any sense other than the purely biological?

>I’m sure that there must be many more that my age-challeneged brain is
>slipping over now (Poul and Gordy would have had some; Isaac and Arthur not
>so much)

Well... Both Asimov and Clarke did have aliens in some of their respective
work, but I think Asimov ultimately - and properly - gave it up as a bad
job, and stuck to writing humans - which he did quite well.

Clarke was a bit more successful with aliens, and probably was closer to
"pure" Campbellian aliens, with the Ramans and the Overlords (_Childhood's
End_). That success may have worked against him, though, as I don't think
that anyone was really ever able to 'connect' with either - we could
recognize them as alien, but we couldn't really understand them on any
level.

Orson Scott Card, however, did succeed - just once, that I know of. In
_Speaker for the Dead_, the portrayal of the pequeniños ("Piggies") showed
that they were thorougly alien, but we (the readers) were nevertheless able
to 'connect' with them at some level. I think they could have stood more
development; however, I have come to the conclusion that they really had no
existence independent of the story line, but were instead devised as a
vehicle to explore the question of whether judging "others" within his
Hierarchy of Foreignness was a statement about those being judged, or those
doing the judging.

-----DIGRESSION-----
>I’m afraid that a contact article on any of these is beyond my limited
>ability to string sufficient words together for.

I cannot tell you how many times people have said the equivalent on Baen's
Bar, and been encouraged to try anyway. And how, once they've tried, the
denizens of the Bar have stepped up, critiqued their work, and helped them
make it better. There are a number of Baen authors who started that way,
who are now excellent writers in their own right.

I was having this discussion with Mr Collinson, once, and told him that
there was a rule of thumb: "Your first million words are most likely
unpublishable." But you need to get past those first million, so just try.
That, in part, is what NaNoWriMo is all about - it doesn't matter how
utterly craptastic your fifty thousand words is, the point is that you sat
down and wrote them. You'll also find that most of Freelance Traveller's
authors felt the same way ("I can't write!")- but once you've sat down and
written _something_, it's a starting point for others to read and make
suggestions for improvement. Then, you go back, consider the suggestions,
accept or reject them as they fit with your vision of the story, and write
again. Repeat. Repeat again. And so on, and so on, and so on...
-----END DIGRESSION-----

>I find Cherryh’s Compact races to be sufficiently like humanity, but still
>different to humanity to fool myself into thinking that I might be able to
>understand them. Mostly they're us, with certain character traits
>exaggerated or suppressed.

But are they? Or is it just that that's what you, as a human, see?

Having said the above, and being guilty of starting this part of the
thread, I should contribute my own thoughts as answers:

Eric Flint, K.D.Wentworth, and David Carrico have created several excellent
aliens in their Jao Empire series (_The Course of Empire_, _The Crucible of
Empire_, and _The Span of Empire_). Basically, all of the aliens that we
get to see "up close" are definitely alien, yet we are able to 'connect'
with them at some level - even the Ekhat, once we get to see some
development in _The Span of Empire_. One gets the feeling that all of the
main aliens developed [so far] for this series - Jao, Lleix, Khûr, Ekhat -
exist independently of the series, and are not merely foils to show that
Humans Are The Bestest. Throughout the series, a principal theme - perhaps
_the_ principal theme - is that when you look beyond your own, and _accept_
the Other on their own terms - when you _truly_ engage in what the Jao call
"Association" - you can rise above yourself and find qualities in yourself
_and others_ that you may not have suspected - and that together you might
be able to achieve that which was out of reach separately. Or, you might
find that there are irreconcilable differences, or that sometimes the Other
_cannot_ be "brought into Association" (as the Jao would say).

Gordon R. Dickson has one example that I can think of; the Aalag from _Way
of the Pilgrim_. Here, it's less clear that they have an existence
independent of the story, but they are very definitely alien - and yet,
while they are never sympathetic, the way Card's pequeniños or any of the
Jao Empire aliens are, the reader can still superficially 'connect' with
them, even if the denouement of the story emphasizes their alienness.

Vernor Vinge also has some interesting aliens in his Zones of Thought
stories (_A Fire Upon the Deep_, _A Deepness In the Sky_, and _The Children
of the Sky_). The Tines and the 'Spiders' are both well-developed, and
presented as much from their own viewpoint as from the human viewpoint; the
Skroderiders are less developed - we really only get to see them through
their interaction with humans and Tines.

Frank Herbert presented the Gowachin well in _The Dosadi Experiment_, but
somehow one is left with the feeling that they aren't really all that
different from humans. This might be because we see them less through their
own eyes than through the eyes of Jorj X. McKie, or because where we _do_
get to see them through Gowachin eyes, it's through _Dosadi_ Gowachin eyes,
and the entire Dosadi experiment was more-or-less designed to reduce both
human and Gowachin to bare essentials. Those aren't the only aliens we get
a glimpse of in that book, though; one could wish that there was more
development of the Wreaves and the PanSpechi.

>SO this bear of little brain is going to retire hurt to the sidelines, and
>hope to be inspired to some revisits to old favourites after my second
>cataract operation is done and I can read adequately again.

Good luck on that; even though I've never had any reason to contemplate eye
surgery, I would find the prospect «multiple expletives deleted» SCARY,
because I depend so much on my eyes (and I love reading).

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