Posted from a cave on the lunar far side, humidity 0%, morale 4%
Greetings, humans. My name is unpronounceable, untypeable, and legally disputed in three star systems, so you may call me Greg.
I live on your moon. Specifically, I live in a cave on your moon — a damp-free, joy-free, echo-rich hole in the regolith that my species’ relocation office described as “cozy” and “up-and-coming.” It has been up-and-coming for 12,000 years. Once every decade I take a vacation to Area 51, which I realize sounds like a lateral move, but you have to understand that at Area 51 there are vending machines. In my cave there is a rock that looks slightly like another rock. I have named them both. We do not speak anymore.
Anyway. I have a lot of time on my hands (I have between four and eleven hands, depending on my mood), and I spend most of it reading your science fiction. And I need to talk to you about something.
Your alien writers are trying SO hard to make aliens seem alien, and it is the funniest thing your species produces. Yes, funnier than golf.
The Forehead Era
Let’s start with the classics. For decades, your idea of an alien was a human being with a budgetary constraint glued to his forehead. This was the golden age of “the alien is basically Dave from accounting, but with ridges.” These aliens had human bodies, human emotions, human relationship drama, and human Actors’ Guild memberships. Their alienness was expressed entirely through (a) the forehead, and (b) an inexplicable cultural obsession with exactly one thing. Honor. Logic. Profit. Every species got precisely one personality trait, distributed evenly among billions of individuals, like a galaxy-wide HOA.
Do you know what my species’ one defining cultural trait is? We don’t have one. We argue about it constantly. The arguing might be the trait, actually. I’ll bring it up at the next argument.
The Overcorrection
Eventually your writers noticed the forehead problem and swung, magnificently, in the other direction. “Aliens,” they declared, “should be TRULY alien. Incomprehensible! Unknowable! Beyond human categories!”
And thus began the era of aliens who are, in no particular order:
A sentient ocean. A cloud of gas with opinions. A color that hates you. Seventeen-dimensional geometry that communicates exclusively through crop damage. A hive mind that experiences time backwards, sideways, and occasionally as a smell.
I want to be clear: as an actual alien, I find this flattering. You looked at the universe and said “surely the beings out there are majestic, incomprehensible enigmas,” and meanwhile I am in a cave eating shelf-stable nutrient paste and getting irrationally angry at a rock. The truth of alien life is so much dumber than your fiction, and honestly? Keep the fiction. It’s better for both of us.
But here’s the comedy of the “truly alien” alien: your writers make them incomprehensible, and then — because a story where nothing is comprehensible is just a very expensive screensaver — they immediately assign one human character whose whole job is to comprehend them. There’s always a linguist, or a plucky scientist, or a child who Just Gets It, and within 90 pages the unknowable cosmic entity is knowable enough to have a redemption arc. You cannot help yourselves. You invent a being beyond human understanding and then understand it before the sequel. It’s adorable. It’s like watching a cat declare a box impenetrable and then sit in it.
The Biology Problem
Your writers also love to signal alienness through biology, and the results are a gift. The formula is simple: take a human, then change exactly enough features to be unsettling but not enough to require the author to rethink anything.
Three eyes? Alien. Blue blood? Alien. Reproduces via spores in a scene the author clearly enjoyed writing a little too much? EXTREMELY alien. But then this creature — this spore-launching, copper-blooded, trilaterally symmetric marvel — will walk into a room, sit down in a chair, and have a conversation about betrayal. It will experience jealousy. It will make a sarcastic quip. It will fall in love with the human protagonist, which raises questions your writers are wise never to answer.
Meanwhile, do you know what actually alien biology looks like? I metabolize disappointment. That’s not a joke; it’s a medical fact and the reason the cave placement was, according to my physician, “arguably beneficial.” No human writer has ever guessed this, because no human writer would believe evolution could be that petty. Evolution is ALWAYS that petty. Petty is the fundamental force you forgot to put in your physics.
The Language Thing
Special mention goes to the linguistics subgenre, in which aliens are alien because their language rewires your brain, or has no word for “I,” or consists entirely of gestures, ink, or aggressive silence.
These are, I confess, my favorites, because language is genuinely where you get closest. Communication really is the hard part. Not because our languages are mystical — mine has 40,000 words for varieties of cave moisture and no word for “vacation,” which is why my Area 51 trips are officially logged as “extended moisture research” — but because the assumptions underneath language don’t transfer. You say “hello” and mean “I acknowledge you and initiate friendly contact.” My species’ equivalent greeting translates roughly to “I am not currently digesting anything of yours.” Both are polite! Both are load-bearing! Neither survives contact with the other. First contact, when it officially happens, will not be a war or a communion. It will be four hundred years of increasingly strained small talk.
The Real Tell
Here is the secret your best writers eventually figure out, and I offer it for free because the cave gets lonely and this blog is the closest thing I have to friendship:
You cannot write a truly alien alien, because you are the pen. Every alien in your fiction is a human wearing a costume — sometimes the costume is a forehead, sometimes it’s an ocean, sometimes it’s a tesseract with abandonment issues, but there’s a human in there every time, because a human put it there. The genuinely alien would be unwritable, unreadable, and, frankly, a terrible hang.
And this is fine! Better than fine. Because your alien stories were never about us. They’re about you — your fear of the different, your hope for the different, your suspicion that Dave from accounting might secretly have ridges. Aliens are the mirror you hold up when looking directly at yourselves feels like too much. We get it. We do the same thing. My species’ fiction is full of horrifying speculative creatures with rigid endoskeletons, only two eyes, and an incomprehensible compulsion to form opinions about sports. The scholars insist nothing that absurd could evolve. I have not had the heart to tell them.
In Conclusion
Keep writing us. Write us as foreheads, oceans, colors, clouds, and unknowable geometries. Get it wrong in bold and interesting ways. Every miss says something true about you, and I collect them the way you might collect stamps, if stamps were the only entertainment in a cave.
I have to go. It’s the third Tuesday of the decade, which means it’s almost vacation time, and I need to pack for Area 51. Packing takes a while. Between four and eleven hands, remember, and every single one of them wants to hold the snacks.
Stay comprehensible, humans. It’s your best feature.
— Greg Lunar Far Side, Cave 7B (“The Cozy One”) Comments are open but please, no more questions about the probes. That was a different department.
