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[KaguroDraven]

I present to you, for your reading pleasure, one of the most awsome sci-fi things I have ever read. Though it comes from the depths of internet hell(4chan) it is an Artifact made of epic and win, with spikes of kickass.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive/2709630/

[BigJake]

Nice to see the humans as the badasses in the galaxy for once.

[KaguroDraven]

That was my thoughts. And reading it it made an incredible amount of sense to be honest. Some of the facts about our race are out and out disturbing if you think about them, a few of which are pointed out in it. But it is still incredibly awesome, and makes me take pride in being human, fuck yeah!

[Zangi]

I like this.

Humans aggression being so foreign and crazy to the aliens?  We got that pat down.

[BigJake]

((WARNING: MASSIVE XENOBIOLOGICAL SPECULATION))
I never understood why every other alien in the universe has to be so much more physically capable than humans.  (Other than dramatic effect, obviously.)  It's not like we didn't evolve over millions of years on a planet that's chock full of deadly predators, toxic insects and globe-spanning pandemics.

I also don't buy how humans always have to be the "evil" or "materialistic" or "conniving" race.  Obviously there should be exceptions (as there should be exceptions* above as well) but won't most of these other species also evolve on planets filled with predators and disease or some analog thereof?  What sci-fi usually describes as our selfishness, etc. are really just animal tendencies and I fail to see why an alien would be exempt from their ancestry.

*Puppeteers, anyone?  Niven fo life!

[KaguroDraven]

Well for one thing that may be how life evolved on earth, but the fact is no human does or ever has known how this stuff REALLY works. The best we can do at the moment is make educated guesses. On other worlds life might come to be and evolve in a vastly different manor than our own, we don't know and likely won't know for a very very very long time. But I do love this vastly different viewpoint than most sci-fi has, where humans are either kicked around by everyone or are the 'diploats' of space. We are a war loveing race and every jump in technology, science, and even philosophy was somehow started by one war or another.

[BigJake]

The thing is, we have no idea what these things or their planets might be like, but we can be sure of one thing.  Competition.  You've got life?  You've got competition.  You've got competition, you've got predators.  You've got predators and you've got cagey, smart things building tools to protect themselves.  That last is a stretch, surely, but are the first two?

edit: I just don't think we should view our materialism and selfishness as somehow odd, or rare.  These are traits shared by every single organism on the planet.  Though our sample size be 1, there are still conclusions that can be drawn.

[KaguroDraven]

Not all of life exists in a competition, look at symbiotes. They exist without competeing with....anything really, they get food from their host, and give their host something in return.

[BigJake]

Symbiotes don't have predators?  What are phages then?  Would a biosphere entirely of symbiotes be viable?  I've no idea, that'd be an interesting place for sure.

[Starver]

When writing such fiction involving xenocultures, the 'lazy' way of doing it is to have ourselves as an average and then exaggerated versions of ourselves, in certain aspects, to make your aliens.

We're probably not average.  But how we aren't average is so unknown that, yes, we can be the most peaceful or warlike beings in the universe.  (But probably we're somewhere between the 1st and 3rd quartiles.)  And so with intelligence, hardiness, etc.


And then there's the whole "aliens aren't anything like us".  In some ways that could be considered lazy (mould the race to be the antognist, without working out why), or it could be carefully thought out, but between the lines, just not written down.

[BigJake]

Unfortunately, very few authors give xenobiology any thought whatsoever.  They always use the same damn archetypes.  Oh look, it's the ant-people; they have hives and queens and workers!  And over there are the lizard people; scales and forked tongues and a hot world!  These guys here are VERY smart but physically fragile and these guys are brutes but dumb as rocks, as if those two things had anything to do with eachother!

Whew, seems I needed to vent a bit.

[KaguroDraven]

We put those together becouse thats how most people view our societies, Smart people are weak and strong people are morons, and the human mind has an extremely hard time comprehending something that is completely alien to us, so we make similarities to us to help us wrap our minds around it.

[BigJake]

It's hardly impossible, though.  Scott Card (fuckass) did it beautifully, as did the aforementioned Niven.  But I'm a hard sci-fi guy.  I could pick this nit for DAYS.

[KaguroDraven]

As could I, I like sci-fi as much as I love fantasy. Oh and about the whole 'stock' sci-fi races, you ever notice the bug people are almost always evil?

[Starver]

Ah yes, I meant to mention that as well as exaggerated anthropomorphisms (like us, but more warlike: Klingons; like us, but more logical: Vulcans) there's anthropomorphism of non-human traits (lizards with blasters, etc, with the blasters being an "IN SPACE" version of the anthropomorphisms we get for fantasy, i.e. "lizards with spears").

Can I recommend Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart's books Wheelers and Heaven, BTW?  While obviously limited by mere human concepts, these two have been long involved in trying to really 'alienise' xenopopulations for SF authors, and develop credible ecosystems along the way, so their own fictional works are very much the best I've seen, not having to bow to the "yeah, but I really want these guys to have arms and hands and fingers" concerns that a 3rd-party might have, for plot purposes.

(There are others who do it decently, of course, but after a while comparisons become subjective anyway.)