I keep seeing criticisms of science fiction alien design by various sources, scientific and otherwise, that intelligent alien species across the genre are fairly universally anthropoid and fail to take into account the myriad of other possibilities of the universe, and then there will be some discussion about how life forms one earth don’t all follow this pattern. Eventually, it winds up at the concept of beings comprised entirely of energy. Take this article as reference.
There is a sub-argument I’d like to address, that of telepathic communication. It seems the same people who deride the currently paranormal ability of telepathic communication while then hypothesizing aliens may communicate directly mind to mind.
Now perhaps I have a anthropoid centered point of view, but I’m not buying any of it.
Let’s start with an easy one, bilateral symmetry. Most aliens in most movies are bilaterally symmetrical for a very practical reason, before CGI became believable and affordable, prosthetics were the way to go, and well, you’re sticking a costume onto a bilaterally symmetrical entity. There was no good way to, say, add a third leg. But we can learn quite a bit from earth. There’s really three types of creatures on the earth in the higher life forms category, things that walk (or scuttle or crawl), things that swim, and things that fly. Of the things that walk or crawl, the predominant means of doing so is by legs. There is that whole gastropod thing, but moving along on your belly floating on a trail of slime isn’t really an evolutionary fast track.
There are many different schema for legs, two, four, six, eight, or many. Never three. Can we imagine an environment where it is so significantly different from our own that having three sides would be a significant advantage? What sort of environment would do this? There are all sorts of ecosystems around, and all sorts of niches, all sorts of temperature ranges. Certainly one of these would have produced a creature of other than bilateral symmetry if it was an evolutionary advantage. There’s a reason we have bilateral symmetry, and it isn’t just that a successful ancestor species somewhere a long way ago happened to make it work, and if it had turned left instead of right, we’d all have three legs. There has been plenty of opportunity, and we haven’t yet seen such a creature.
As we think also about those other things, things that fly and swim, we notice the same thing. There are some odd means of propulsion in water, from jet propulsion to the full body writhe, but the most dominant by far is one tail fin and two side flippers. For flying creatures, two wings, two legs. There are a couple experiments with four wings, but they were evolutionary dead ends.
I’m all for creativity, but the overwhelming evidence tells me the predominant creature design features bilateral symmetry with legs and arms in pairs, more likely fewer rather than more. No conceptual artist has ever been able to show me a practical model for trilateral symmetry, so as a realistic fiction device, I have to reject it. The argument is, just because we can’t prove it doesn’t exist, doesn’t mean it doesn’t, but as a practical reality, I’m not convinced of any life beyond the bilateral.
Then there are the more far-reaching visions of this criticism, things where we’d have to redefine what we mean as “life”. We rely on our world of carbon-based life forms as a basis for what we should expect. Carbon is in every bit of life, and in every bit of DNA, I suspect this due to carbon’s flexibility in its chemical properties to chain together in so many forms and in so many molecules. It is structural and chemical, and I have yet to see evidence that any other atom is so flexible in its uses. We aren’t making nanotubes and buckyballs of hydrogen or iron or uranium. Even crystalline structured molecules are useful in only a couple ways each. Sure they’re pretty to look at, but diamonds and sapphires and quartz all have their own industrial and technological uses.
At the same time there are viruses, rogue bits of DNA which can replicate and evolve, but have no organs, no brains, no cell walls, just a code. Our way of killing them is to break them up so the code cannot replicate, which is an astonishingly difficult thing to do. Do we consider these molecules, or alive (or merely inconvenient)?
Minerals have evolved over time, in the natural world becoming more complex, and while they are a complex union of atoms, and while the unions can replicate, they aren’t a virus, and we don’t consider them living, so a virus, which is after all just a large molecule, should fall into this category as well, right? There is a side argument in the article mentioned above against life being necessarily complex, so I also have to conclude complexity is not a defining characteristic of life, but complexity is an important characteristic of character and writing.
What a virus has over a mineral is code. The code of DNA provides instructions for the molecule to do what it does in certain environment, which is a step from intelligence, and unless you’re doing an Outbreak/Andromeda Strain story, a virus as a character doesn’t make sense, and a virus with decision making intelligence doesn’t make sense, remember we’re really talking about writing interesting narratives here, and character is a big part of that task. I can’t call code living either, otherwise computer programs would be living entities by definition, and I always had problems with this, even in the transplant consciousness into computers storylines. I do have to say that this code is one of the things that is a requisite for the definition of life, but not a definition of life. So maybe at this point we could conclude code a precursor to life, which leaves open the possibilities of computers one day coming alive.
But this also precludes the idea of an energy field being alive for me, even though scientists will caution us that life may exist as energy fields of some sort or some way, I’m not convinced. It strikes me that Douglas Adams was criticizing this concept with an off hand line about “super intelligent shades of the color blue.” Thing is, energy fields are unorganized clouds of plasma, i.e. a cloud of electrons, or the side effects of the flow of some sort of energy, like the magnetic field of flowing electrons. There is no coded information, nothing that can self-replicate. When the source is gone, so is the energy field. I have never seen any scientific evidence that energy fields can store data, especially without an external power source.
This reminds me, if “paranormal investigators” say ghosts are made up of electromagnetic fields, and scientists say ghosts don’t and can’t exist, but they point to the possibilities of “life” existing as an energy field, how do you justify that cognitive dissonance? Energy fields are disorganized, and carry no code. We know from our study of DNA how it affects our views on life in surprisingly specific ways. The needle on nature vs. nurture is shifting ever towards nature as we study the coding in our DNA. This is not to say we are simply a product of coded information. We are more complex than that, we can make decisions based on stimuli that are beyond what is coded in our DNA.
This goes for telepathy as well. My aliens will not speak via telepathy without the support of some technology to justify it. Scientists have found no means for direct brain to brain communication, and yet scientists describe aliens who could do it. Maybe there is a split in the generic group of “scientists,” and scientists who believe in telepathic aliens also believe in telepathic humans, but I don’t see a lot of evidence this is the case, it seems like another cognitive dissonance in science moments. For me there must be a medium for that broadcast.
I guess this leads me to my conclusion, life begins at response, for me as a fiction writer. I see very little reason why life shouldn’t be some sort of organic being, be it based on carbon or not, but corporeal. This doesn’t mean I won’t write ghost stories, or stories using magic or anything else, these are based on established tradition, but I’d doubt I ever write a character who appears as an energy field.
One of the hallmarks of characters who appear solely as energy fields is a detachment from concern about those of us unfortunately stuck in a body. The last story where there were hyper intelligent shades of blue I read was The Last Theorum by Arthur C. Clarke and Fred Pohl, in which galactic overlords decided to wipe us out in their own sweet time because we had nuclear weapons, so they should probably take care of us before go were a nuisance to other galactic neighbors. This is a general trend among energy field beings. They feel so elite and godlike, they have no qualms of destroying us because we looked at them wrong, or fed them a tuna salad sandwich that had gone bad. Thing is, I can write characters with the same detachment, and more importantly I can make a better back story for a character’s detachment, make a better story by doing more work as a writer than having a species with corporeal body envy. Just once I’d like to see an alien energy field who is struggling in life in a dead end job, or is the underdog to humans, or just wants to pop in the diner for a bite to eat on its day as an interstellar trucker. That would be a change of perspective at least.
So that’s how I’m calling it. There may be times to deviate from this I don’t foresee, but right now, I can’t imagine a reason why I should have to.
I think I’ll write some reviews of what I’m reading so that some of you might be able to follow what is going in that creates some of my output. I picked this book to read because I like things that start off with obscure science and math and tries to make it accessible to the reader. I’m certainly not an expert in any of these topics, but usually I can follow well enough to get the book on a more than the average human. I am also feeling a little shy on my hard SF background, and I had the money and the book was there and I wasn’t finding much more at the time. Seem fair? I’ll try to give you an idea of what I learned about writing for each book that I review as well.
The plot centers around Ranjit Subramanian, a math student at a university in Sri Lanka. The first act of the book sets up some of the later characters, but I’m going to focus on Ranjit. Plus, I don’t remember most of their names (shows how memorable they were) and I’ve loaned the book out. The second plot-line features a race of super beings called the Super Galactics who decide the humans on Earth are a threat and need to eliminate them. They send some races there to observe while they send in their henchmen. We’ll discuss some of the races of aliens in a bit. The first act doesn’t really do much in reality, so we’ll move to act 2. In the setup parts of act one, a family friend gets into some trouble, and disappears, leaving a family behind.
Act 2 focuses on Ranjit reuniting them, and finding out that he is now working as a pirate. Ranjit winds up as a hostage on a cruise ship, watching the children and teaching them maths tricks. Eventually the ship is liberated, but Ranjit is held prisoner, during which time he solves Fermat’s last theorem. Shortly after he memorizes his proof, his ransom is met, and he is freed. It is worth mentioning that a new weapon is used to fight the pirates, a non-lethal weapon, and this kind of weapon is interesting to the races rushing to destroy the human race, after all, if they can fight their battles without killing, they aren’t a threat anymore.
Act 3 begins with an ethical dilemma. There is a new weapon on Earth and it is used first on North Korea. The weapon is kind of like an EMP which disables all electronics and weapons in a given area. The group that is in charge of this weapon is part of the U.N. Ranjit is asked to be a part of the group by a childhood friend who is now working on codes and the like for some intelligence services. Ranjit decides not to join.
This is the point where I’ll stop giving you plot details because this is where for all intents and purposes, the plot ends. Ranjit spends the rest of the book, something like 60% of it, watching the world as he gets older, has kids, watches the space elevator get built on Sri Lanka, and teaches at a university. And that’s the real problem with the book, halfway through, the main character walks away from the conflict. Had Ranjit taken the job, and been entwined in the ethical issues presented by the weapon, there would have been a book there.
Fred Pohl indicates that by the time the book was handed to him, Clarke was getting spotty, and so he had to interpret and invent a little bit to get the book right. Problem is, the main character is as much of a spectator as the reader. This is emphasized by how much business Pohl had to invent for Ranjit to do while watching. He has problems figuring out how to be a good professor, he reads a lot of newspapers. He has some personal business to attend to. Nothing that makes for an interesting book. You keep hoping that this is just a lull that is leading to something else, but it never does.
Another disappointing element of the book is the aliens. They can fly millions of light years, and then they get here and ask some of the dumbest questions, like “Why do you live in certain areas of the planet, instead of spreading strictly evenly about the world?” Apparently their planet is evenly rosy and beautiful all over.
They also describe some of the aliens and they make little sense. There’s a race called “The nine limbeds” that are so called because htey have eight limbs that they walk on, kind of like a centipede, and one on their butt that they use to do all of the rest of their “business”. I’m tired of the notion that aliens are stranger than we can imagine, and certainly not beings with two arms and two legs like us and every Star Trek episode. I’m more of the idea that there’s a good chance that they are. We evolved this way for a reason, because it is an efficient model for what we need to do to survive. I think there’s a reason that throughout our planet’s history, the larger animals had four limbs, and it isn’t directly related to a common ancestor with four limbs, and the rest of us are just variations on a theme. The menagerie of aliens in this book reads like a spore creature designer on a little too much acid, and not enough good design sense.
So my review of the book is this: a promising act one, no conflict, dumb and poorly designed aliens, flat characters, and a book that could have been much better.
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