In Alien Flesh Read online

  There are a lot of kinds of aliens in sf. The most common is the human in a Halloween suit, like the vegetable man in the 1951 version of The Thing. In that great old lumbering Howard Hawks movie, everything's a symbol. The alien stands for godless communism. The soft-headed scientists who try to make contact, despite obvious hostility, symbolize the liberals. And the U.S. Air Force, of course, symbolizes the U.S. Air Force. The alien is completely understandable.

  Then there's the alien who stands for a part of our own history. The Galactic Empire motif, with its equation of planet = colony, aliens = indians, is really replaying the past. (Sometimes the indians even win.)

  For me, the unexamined alien is not worth meeting. Yet the most compelling aspect of aliens is their fundamental unknowability. The best signifier for this, I think, is language. In Ian Watson's fine novel The Embedding, aliens come to barter with us for our languages, not our science and art, because these are the keys to a deeper sensing of the world. Each species’ language gives a partial picture of reality.

  The technical problem a writer faces in depicting alien languages is how to convey any information and yet be convincingly strange. If it's just gibberish, you gain nothing and look funny, too. Broken English won't do, and the usual sf cliche of awkward frog-speak is boring.

  I don't have any theoretical solution to this problem, just some particular attempts. This story is one such; my novels try it at greater length. In a way, rendering the alien is the Holy Grail of sf, because if your attempt can be accurately summarized, you know you've failed.

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