this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2023
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I'm doing a reread of Human To Human by Rebecca Ore. It's the third book in the trilogy.
It's an old scifi series from the early ninties, but holds up well. I absolutely love how she designs her aliens.
The first book is Becoming Alien.
I was itching for a good alien show recently, didn't find anyhting I liked (though with so many streaming services, couldn't figure out where to watch half the stuff).
If not TV, I can atleast read a good aliens book. Will check it out.
It is pretty hard to find a good alien show on TV or in movies.
The downside of Star Trek is that aliens are often TOO human, and the downside of Star Wars is some of the aliens are TOO alien...
I find SFF literature does a much better job than visual media at really exploring alien psychology and and how communication might go with aliens who do not look human. Because it can base things in real scientific concepts without worrying overmuch about how much the CGI or prosthetics will cost, or if you'll lose the casual non-nerd viewer.
I've a few quibbles about how Rebecca Ore looks at human behavior with a little too much "nature" over "nurture", esp. re: gender dynamics, but the biology really is solid with the aliens. And you could argue she's only looking at humans through the same lens she uses on her aliens.
She posits that intelligent life will sort of fill certain convergently evolved body plans, much like how in an ecosystem animals with very different ancestors can come to look like one another.
Like the mammal wolf and the marsupial tasmanian tiger (Thylacine) have converged to have even really similar skull shapes despite one being a placental mammal and the other a marsupial, or how sharks and dolphins have very similar body plans despite one being a fish and the other a mammal.
So in the series, there's a few "buckets" that most sapient aliens evolved to fit in...ape-like ex-brachiators, bipedal ground-walking birds/aivan lizards, bear-type creatures, bat-like creatures. There's cases where the main character runs into two "birds" but they're not even from the same planet, they just both evolved a bird-like form and became intelligent separately.
The computer tech in her series is old--pre-internet sci-fi didn't do the greatest job of predicting how fast or complex computer and information technology would become--and the main character is a not-too-bright everyman sort of character...
...but it still works pretty well, to allow us to deconstruct her world through his eyes.
Interestingly enough, my favorite characters aren't the humans (they're all very flawed), but instead the aliens, esp. the Rector and the Sub-Rector.
Yeah, I agree about alien shows and movies. There are still some fun shows, if you are willing to let go of few things, like Falling Skies.
Thanks for such a detailed response, it looks interesting. I am going to check it out.