I would like to take a minute here to begin traveling down a line of reasoning that, I’m sure, will be a perennial one in this course; this being the ability of human beings to imagine what alien life would be like.

The nature of aliens is a question that appears all over science fiction literature, film, and television, with interpretations ranging from people in green body paint to giant pixelated amorphous blobs. The Kanamits of To Serve Man are – and I say this as somebody who thoroughly enjoyed the episode – a good example of a rather unimaginative take on alien life. They are simply tall humans with bulbous heads. Visual mediums like The Twilight Zoine seem to be more commonly guilty of such portrayals, partially because it is much easier to leave appearances up to the imagination in writing than it is in film or the visual arts.

I understand that, often, the physiological nature of the aliens is besides the point. For many works of science fiction, it is enough that they are signified as “other”, and that signifier can be as simple as a pair of antennae attached to a headband. This, paired with a narrative, is enough to let us know that, wherever the beings are from, it isn’t Earth. However, biologically speaking, I can think of no good reason that a species which developed on a planet other than ours should look too humanoid in nature. To me, visualizing aliens as such all to often reeks of an anthropocentric point of view that I find to be quite aggravating.

That, or a lower-than-optimal budget.

There are some exceptions to this viewpoint of mine. For example, it may be the case that an author wishes to explore the possibility that human life came from another planet. In which case, the inhabitants of that planet would likely look quite a bit like us. And yes, if aliens were to be subject to similar selective pressures as life on Earth, they could certainly evolve similar features to organisms on our planet. Fin-like organs, for example, would be useful in water on any planet. These are, however, specific exceptions and somewhat besides the point. Assuming that the alien life is truly alien and thus evolved on a planet far from Earth in response to a different set of selective pressures, to have them resemble life on Earth – especially human beings – too closely would be unrealistic and unimaginative.

Or would it? As I write this, I am reminded of the incredible diversity of life on this planet and the many and varied solutions that different species have developed to cope with many and varied selective pressures. The odds that some form of life on another planet might have evolved a similar solution to a similar challenge as has an Earth-creature are nonzero. So maybe it isn’t the plain fact of alien life being often portrayed as similar to life on Earth that’s getting to me, but the reasons for that trend. It often seems to occur due to a lack of interest in the nature of alien physiology and, though I am not at all saying that that is the most worthwhile question for science fiction to pursue, I do wish it were pursued more often.

This is why I am so excited by science fiction stories like Prott, which really take the time to delve into alien biology and to ask what alien physiology would really be like. Just how far from what we are used to would it be? Would we even recognize it as life? How would a human being react to the truly alien, to life different in every way to that which we are used to and understand? All these are wonderfully interesting questions that make for wonderfully interesting literature.