At 10:27 PM -0400 10/12/2000, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>I don't think you can make an alien too alien or it ceases to be of interest
>to humans.
That's not necessarily so, though. The novel was a bomb, but the point was
made in the Silverberg novel _The Alien Years_ that the very
inexplicability of an alien species can make them of interest . . . as long
as you focus on the humans trying to grapple with that inexplicability. In
other words, the aliens have to be somewhat peripheral even if they're the
focus of all the characters - - you can't have a main character alien who
is this inexplicable. At least, it would be REALLY hard to do in a book.
Maybe in a film it would be possible.
>This is after all fiction.
[In fact, the way that books work, being written in a human language and
assuming, you know, things like plots and characters and all of that, is so
very human in and of itself that if you try to construct a character who is
an alien, you do it generally by the degree of variation from human traits
that you use for a given alien. So it's all still about those traits we
think of as human, and so on...]
>Until and unless we encounter a true
>alien intelligence (whatever that means) I don't think it is possible to know
>what an alien intelligence that we would recognize as intelligent would be
>like.
Though of course it is possible to imagine all kinds of stuff... it's just
difficult to do without mapping it onto human intelligence.
By the way, all of this attention to Vinge is making me move _AFUtD_ up my
pile to the top, for the holidays. There are other books I'm slogging
through (I have just acquired a reader for my thesis with a distinct
interest in Delany and Le Guin, so I gotta read some of their stuff now,
and I am trying to get through _The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born_), but
I think the books I'll be bringing home on my trip to Saskatoon will be
Maureen McHugh's _Half the Day is Night_ and _A Fire Upon the Deep_.
Though, for right now, it's _The Player of Games_ among others.
Gord
PS: I also just finished _The Diamond Age_ and would be pleased if people
were interested in discussing it. :)
