Human-Centric Stories in Science Fiction

Why is it so common in science fiction to focus on the human? Or entities based on humans?

I am guilty of this in my own writing as well, there aliens merely exist as either allies or enemies to a dominantly human society. That society has aliens within it as citizens, but not in any key positions, as of the story's telling.

I guess it is because we are all human and know about being human. But it would be interesting to come up with a completely alien mindset, physiology, and culture. And to follow such a character in their world/universe completely devoid of any human elements.

Do you know of any such work? Where there are no humans around? Only aliens?
What are your thoughts on this?

 

I think part of this comes down to write what you know. Human writers know how humans think. Alien thought processes are just that alien.
How would a creature that evolved in the subsurface oceans of one of Jupiter's ice moons think or sense?

 

Interesting question. I'd imagine they would communicate a lot like whales perhaps with pulsed calls, or perhaps somehow electrically? Thought-wise, it wouldn't know there were planets and space outside, because of the frozen cap above it, probably. I'd imagine it wouldn't need eyes sine there would be no light down there. Or maybe there is some sort of light from plants and animals?

Such thoughts can create many interesting scenarios.

This thread reminded me of a story I read here, where we saw things from inside the point of view of a dog. It was pretty well done and interesting.

 

I think most stories are human-centric? The reason being, humans are the ones reading them. Even if the POV belongs to an android, or an animal, there would be the tendency to anthropomorphize. Humans connect to what they know.

 

My friend and I co-wrote a story, starting after seeing Star Wars, where all the characters were aliens. We were inspired by the Cantina Sequence, and made the decision early on to have no human characters. It was a lot of fun, but of course, as with TV shows that have aliens etc, you either end up with 'people in rubber makeup,' or 'people in rubber suits.' Of course today you can have totally alien-seeming creatures thanks to modern special effects, but the farther you get away from the human model, the less relatable they become. It's true visually in movies and TV shows, and it's true expressively or emotionally in stories.

We understand the human face and how it expresses emotion and feelings etc. We can't understand how a totally alien physiognomy can do that. The only choice really is to humanize it in some way. In a visual medium you do that by letting the actor's face show through in all the key areas so they can move the eyebrows, the mouth, etc in recognizable ways. In writing you do that by giving them some attributes that function like expressive features on a human face. Something like "He twitched a feeler sadly."

The fact is we don't and probably can't understand or relate to how something totally alien would think, or feel, or express its emotions (if they have any). And if a writer would work hard enough to create something completely alien (if that's possible), then how would the readers or viewers be able to relate to it? So far we have no model for an intelligent species capable of language and communication that isn't human. Some of the higher animals can understand simple phrases if taught, but that's closer to the grunts and shrieks etc animals use to express very simple concepts, their brains aren't complex enough for actual language. So all attempts to create a completely alien but highly intelligent species are based entirely on conjecture, and of course we default to human models. The farther they get from human, the harder they become to write or model in ways that we can understand or relate to. Ultimately, our best efforts will probably always be some form of 'humans in rubber masks or makeup.'

 

Even if it is an alien in a rubber mask, that POV can be useful for commentary on the human race, and our silliness.

 

Yeah, the aliens in my stories are human in many ways. I've yet to create something completely alien. It's like you said, Xoic, that it would be very difficult and a lot of thought would need to go into it. And the result would still be conjecture.

But as an experiment, such a story might hold interest. I'd love to read it if it's out there. Might be difficult to relate to and to follow.

 

(Referring back to my previous post)—All the characters were aliens, but really they were all effectively people with weird things about them—extra arms or legs, antennae or feelers, strange coloration, etc. But aside from all that, which really only comes into play during the description or when they can use the extra arms or whatever for something, we just wrote them as characters, and basically their bodies were human-shaped.

This is how it's always been. In mythology they used a very simple code—the non-human characters were either animals or human-animal hybrids. They'd choose the animal parts to express something—animal heads mean it's stupider than a person, arms/legs of a very strong animal means it's extremely strong, etc. Very simple and understandable. This really has continued into fantasy and science fiction, but we've gotten more complex and subtle with it. Rather than half-human/half-animal hybrids joined at the waist (simple universal symbolism), we get more creative, but still we mostly just add animal parts to the basic human frame. There are insectoid aliens, jellyfish-like ones, walking carrots (I'm thinking of some 1950's low budget sci-fi movies). And now we have much more complex scientific concepts such as the weird transformations Jeff Vandermeer used in the Southern Reach trilogy (which began with Annihilation). He borrowed concepts from biology, which he's very familiar with. One of the most alien creatures was a gigantic blob-thing sliding slowly down a hillside, covered with eyes. And because earlier he had shown us a porpise with disturbingly human and expressive eyes (expressing absolute horror if I remember right), I imagined the jellyfish-blob thing (a transformed human character) having cartoon versions of the eyes of the woman it had been plastered all over it. So even that is still a human/animal hybrid, and the eyes are human—the most expressive parts. The windows of the soul.

It largely comes down to economy. If you wanted to create some kind of elaborate and fully-alien creature, it would be extremely hard to describe or to wrangle any kind of recognizable emotion or ideas from. So you use a shorthand—the same one we're all familiar with going all the way back to when the Egyptians put animal heads on human bodies to symbolize their gods.* And we all know the code—mammals are warm fuzzy 'friendly' creatures, reptiles are cold and inhuman, etc. You see it in the Japanese movie War of the Gargantuas, where one giant alien (mutant?) creature is something like a gorilla, covered with brown hair, and the other is covered with green scales, so it's a reptile, and therefore the bad guy. Simple symbolic representation of a very familiar code.



Actually they both sort of have a mix of scales and fur, but one is brown and the other green. Ape and reptile. Good and bad. In fact I just realized, they each have a bit of the coloring of the other one. So they're sort of like the Yin/Yang symbol, where each half contains an 'eye' of the opposite color. A little mix-and-match going on. But one color predominates in each.

* I guess animal heads don't always mean stupider than human. Maybe it can mean their main focus is different. Hawk-head, dog-head, etc. The main attribute of the chosen animal-part is what's intended to be understood.

 

In fact even the idea of something covered with eyes (to represent watchfulness or that it can see all the way around itself) goes back to ancient representations of gods and other mythological figures. Angels in the Bible had lots of eyes. Here's an accurate depiction of the way angels were described (probably in Revelation):



By multiplying the eyes (or making them very large) you increase their importance. This code exists in dreams as well, so it comes from the deep unconscious. Any symbol that's very important in a dream will often either get larger or be multiplied. I remember when I was an adolescent at the cusp of adulthood, I had dreams with a lot of dangerous wild animals in them. At first I'd just see a few relatively harmless ones, then there would be more and more, and the fear would ratchet up as they increased (either multiplied or got bigger and more frightening-looking). This is how it works—these ideas that are so expressive in dreams come directly from our internal hard wiring. They're universal, work in any language, and we're all deeply familiar with them (we all dream). So they became codes used in myth and fairy tale etc. And from there they worked their way into stories and movies. They've just become more subtle, complex, and realistic.

 

Interesting. In my own work I have giant reptiles who are the antagonist species against the humans. I created them that way without too much thought behind it. Must be osmosis that taught me that reptiles = bad in most cases. I also have a benevolent aquatic species who are allied to humanity, and who live in peace with them in the same territory. Humans on land, aquatics in the oceans.

 

Bad or simply cold blooded. It could be as simple as a lack of compassion or empathy that causes humans to see them as bad.

 

If an author does that, then the focus is going to be different. Anything truly ailen won't be able to function as a dramatic character (at least not without a lot of difficult finagling that would be very hard on author and reader). So more likely it would be a story with a different kind of focus. Conceptual (intellectual) rather than dramatic maybe. Something like a mediatation on the nature of humanity, with the aliens serving as contrast. Ultimately stories written by humans are about being human. What else could we possibly write about, we don't know anything else?

 

Yeah, this is what it is. The term 'cold blooded' has a symbolic meaning aside from its purely biological interpretation, as so many terms do. Lack of compassion or empathy is basically what makes humans bad. Or animals, or aliens. The symbolic language of drama works across all species, but humanity is at the core of it, because we're human, and it's all we'll ever be or know. In a dream or a story or a movie or a painting or a poem, even trees and rocks and clouds can be cold and inhuman, or they can be warm and friendly. Background colors have the same traits—the more blue is in it, the colder and therefore unwelcoming it is. The more red/orange/yellow is in it, the warmer or hotter it becomes.

Even just the words warm, hot, cold, and cool have symbolic meanings relating to level of caring for other people. A person can be cold or cool, or they can be warm or hot-tempered (meaning extremely passionate). Hot has another meaning relating to sexiness, but that's outside of this particular symbolism. It's recent slang. As is cool meaning one cool dude (think Fonzie). But really that still generally means someone who's a bit detached and maybe sarcastic. Though the word cool, used as slang, has recently changed its meaning to also mean good or likeable. But before the sixties cool meant subdued in passions, detached and unavailable. And it still means that in relation to human (or animal or alien) temperament—'She was cool and detached, sipping occasionally on her martini and still wearing the huge Audrey Hepburn sunglasses, even in the dimly lit and smoky bar.'

 

The series Resident Alien contains some of what we are discussing about an alien POV. The big difference is that it explores the impact of Humans on the aliens thought process.

 

District 9 walked this line. The viewer is supposed to be unsympathetic to the prawns early, then subtle visual changes increase their human %. Colour, number of spikes/horns, and most interesting to me: variation in personalities from creature to creature.

 

In the case of Resident Alien, the alien is taking a human form to hide. Which is a bit of irony since the alien was on a mission to destroy the human race

 

Sort of the same premise of the Xenomorphs in the Alien franchise (they were beginning to evolve toward looking like us), as well as the thing in The Thing, and the big cockroaches in the Mimic movies. Some of them just tried to mimic the human form as a disguise, some actually could talk and took the memories of the people. Oh, and also like the Body Snatchers. I'm sure there are many more Stranger Among Us type stories with aliens disguised as humans.

And once again, it's human behavior put into alien creatures to illustrate the concept. 'A wolf in sheep's clothing,' 'Wearing an empathetic mask,' etc. Many people disguise themselves as their victims to get in among them (spies for instance).

And it works the other way around too—many prey species disguise themselves as predators as a form of self defense. Brightly colored but non-venemous snakes for instance, moths that look like the faces of owls etc. The trick can be used both ways.

Aliens and monsters are really us. It's an imaginative way of examining some of these behaviors.

 

I think it's mostly because of what others have mentioned already; that most readers want to read stories that they can relate to in some way. There's certainly a market for non-human-centered stories, though I guess it's probably not as large. Two very cool and original books came to mind right away - Dragon's Egg and it's sequel Starquake by Robert L. Forward. Here's the blurb from the wiki page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon%27s_Egg):

"In the story, Dragon's Egg is a neutron star with a surface gravity 67 billion times that of Earth, and inhabited by cheela, intelligent creatures the size of a sesame seed who live, think and develop a million times faster than humans. Most of the novel, from May to June 2050, chronicles the cheela civilization beginning with its discovery of agriculture to advanced technology and its first face-to-face contact with humans, who are observing the hyper-rapid evolution of the cheela civilization from orbit around Dragon's Egg."

 

Writing challenge accepted. See you in alien number of years.

 

You should research up before launching on that. Here's a few articles and stuff:

• Writing Realistic Aliens – The Definitive Guide
• Alien Writing: How to Write Things That Don’t Exist
• How do I write something completely Alien? @ Reddit Not sure how good. I mean—it's Reddit
• Tips on writing alien characters @ Reddit
• Truly Alien Beings @ Reddit
• What Would It Take to Imagine a Truly Alien Alien? @ Wired

 

Jumping to Fantasy here for a second. This thread reminded me of one Series I read that had me rolling with laughter.
Everyone Loves Large Chests:Morningwood by Neven Iliev.
The MC is a shape shifting mimic, who is just close enough to human in thought so as to be relatable, yet the different outlook on life comes through. This is not a book for kids, you have been warned there are sexual themes and tons of double entendres.

 

I don't know why, maybe @Xoic's picture above, but this thread put me in mind of this and similar pictures. Predators might take on one starling, but would surely reconsider if faced by this. Murmuration, even if the site's spellcheck doesn't like it, is quite a lovely word too.

 

Really @Xoic redit?? I wouldn't trust that site to tell me the sky is blue, while looking at a blue sky.

 

I know, but sometimes it'll surprise you.