This is an essay on aliens in sci-fi, particularly crowdsourced sci-fi fiction wikis, and why they should be sparse. That’s right, it’s not all short stories, got some critical essays in me as well. Aliens in sci-fi: cheap. They cheapen the scope, they cheapen the scale of space travel, they cheapen any appreciation of deep time in the setting, they cheapen alienation, and ultimately cheapen the story. Maybe up to some threshold, like the game of life, you can have a few aliens. But beyond that, you’re Futurama, or Rick and Morty, just grab bag cartoonish aliens. Lovecraftian stuff doesn’t count because it plays by its own rules and *does* have a sense of deep time, so you simultaneously get the sense of deep continuity combined with the weird rules, and hopefully a sense of cosmic dread comes with the contemplation. But Hard Sci-fi is generally a different kind of vibe. Hard Sci-fi wants you to feel a little bit competent as you inhabit its world, capable of extrapolating some of the possibilities, or at least getting that pop-sci article feeling when a procedural concept clicks in to your intuition. There’s some sense of consistency in most Hard Sci-fi that isn’t also cosmic horror. So therefore, any alien species has got to have a real scheme, like Tolkien’s Elves. That’s probably a good place to start:
Aliens are Cheap
Aliens are Cheap
Aliens are Cheap
This is an essay on aliens in sci-fi, particularly crowdsourced sci-fi fiction wikis, and why they should be sparse. That’s right, it’s not all short stories, got some critical essays in me as well. Aliens in sci-fi: cheap. They cheapen the scope, they cheapen the scale of space travel, they cheapen any appreciation of deep time in the setting, they cheapen alienation, and ultimately cheapen the story. Maybe up to some threshold, like the game of life, you can have a few aliens. But beyond that, you’re Futurama, or Rick and Morty, just grab bag cartoonish aliens. Lovecraftian stuff doesn’t count because it plays by its own rules and *does* have a sense of deep time, so you simultaneously get the sense of deep continuity combined with the weird rules, and hopefully a sense of cosmic dread comes with the contemplation. But Hard Sci-fi is generally a different kind of vibe. Hard Sci-fi wants you to feel a little bit competent as you inhabit its world, capable of extrapolating some of the possibilities, or at least getting that pop-sci article feeling when a procedural concept clicks in to your intuition. There’s some sense of consistency in most Hard Sci-fi that isn’t also cosmic horror. So therefore, any alien species has got to have a real scheme, like Tolkien’s Elves. That’s probably a good place to start: