I'm not sure they are tbh. I'm pretty sure the Starship Enterprise has encountered every possible form of civilisation that it's creators could think of in the course of its ongoing mission. Everyone in Star Wars isn't from Earth and a good 50% of them are the goodies.
Why are S ci-fi 'aliens' almost invariably malevolent?
Because "people from Earth meet people from other planets, and everyone gets along" makes for a boring movie, book, or TV show.
I don't think your premise is true even for mass-market movie Scifi, though. Consider Avatar, for example. The aliens are the good guys, and the malevolent people in the story are some of the humans.
The Day The Earth Stood Still had an alien that was bad news for earth, but only because it saw humanity as bad news in itself. Humanity was given a second chance.
Blake's Seven included a very supportive alien in the telepath Cally.
Close Encounters Of The Third Kind has benevolent aliens and slightly malevolent government agents, as does the same director's E.T.
Off the top of my head, I think War Of The Worlds is the only time Spielberg has featured ill-intentioned aliens.
Knowing from the late 2000s also has benevolent aliens, trying to help humanity survive a terminal heat wave, though they seem somewhat sinister prior to the revelation of their mission. (Underrated film, in my opinion.)
Lovecraft, H.G. Wells, et al - people love to be spooked by what they don't understand. And extra terrestrial beings are like the epitome of what we don't understand.
Knowing from the late 2000s also has benevolent aliens, trying to help humanity survive a terminal heat wave, though they seem somewhat sinister prior to the revelation of their mission. (Underrated film, in my opinion.)
Yes, the aliens in Knowing come as something of a surprise.
A good film, on the whole, but spoiled for me by the totally unrealistic train derailment sequence.
Knowing from the late 2000s also has benevolent aliens, trying to help humanity survive a terminal heat wave, though they seem somewhat sinister prior to the revelation of their mission. (Underrated film, in my opinion.)
Yes, the aliens in Knowing come as something of a surprise.
A good film, on the whole, but spoiled for me by the totally unrealistic train derailment sequence.
I don't quite recall that sequence. Is that one of the disasters predicted by the little girl in her time-capsule note?
I did REALLY like the scene of the plane crash on the highway.
The western world sees itself as superior to the rest of the world in technology which it has dominated and exploited.
The aliens can be seen as a frighteningly more extreme version of ourselves.
Well, yes, in many popular sci-fi films what is played out is 'what if the aliens treated us like we treated other people'.
H.G. Wells laid down that moral template in WotW, and the Spielberg film picks up on it by having the protagonist's young daughter writing an essay on French colonialism in Algeria.
The Spielberg version is terrible, redeemed only by a few "so bad it's good" scenes such as the moment when Tom Cruise punches an alien in the face. The 1953 version is a lot closer to the spirit of the original. Key point: there is nothing at all humans can do to save themselves, it is the bacteria wot won it...
Knowing from the late 2000s also has benevolent aliens, trying to help humanity survive a terminal heat wave, though they seem somewhat sinister prior to the revelation of their mission. (Underrated film, in my opinion.)
Yes, the aliens in Knowing come as something of a surprise.
A good film, on the whole, but spoiled for me by the totally unrealistic train derailment sequence.
I don't quite recall that sequence. Is that one of the disasters predicted by the little girl in her time-capsule note?
I did REALLY like the scene of the plane crash on the highway.
The Spielberg version is terrible, redeemed only by a few "so bad it's good" scenes such as the moment when Tom Cruise punches an alien in the face. The 1953 version is a lot closer to the spirit of the original. Key point: there is nothing at all humans can do to save themselves, it is the bacteria wot won it...
It was the bacteria that ultimately won in the Spielberg version as well(granted after a lot of the tossed-in action stuff you mention). The tripods started stumbling about in the street, and then they collapse with the hatches opening and dead aliens drenched in fluid come pouring out. Morgan Freeman then intones the darwinian lesson about staying away from places you don't belong.
I've seen the 1953 version, but don't remember it as well, except the leading man's pickup line involving his eyeglasses. What I found interesting about the Spielberg film was what one critic framed as the seeming intent to give the audience the feel that they're encountering the idea of an alien invasion for the first time. While the shoot-em-up stuff is definitely there, the invasion itself is handled with more subtlety, I found. IIRC, we first see them when Cruise goes out to his suburban street sees them pounding holes in the concrete.
The Spielberg version is terrible, redeemed only by a few "so bad it's good" scenes such as the moment when Tom Cruise punches an alien in the face. The 1953 version is a lot closer to the spirit of the original. Key point: there is nothing at all humans can do to save themselves, it is the bacteria wot won it...
As has been said there's probably two reasons for this phenomena. First that it makes more exciting stories (though, you can have good stories on the culture shock of the arrival of even benevolent aliens, assuming they're benevolent and ignorant of the harm such shock could cause). And, second sci-fi authors (especially the good ones) often use their art as commentary on contemporary society, including Western authors commenting on colonialism etc.
It's also possible that sci-fi authors subconsciously recognise that we live in a dark forest.
In Big Ancestor (F L Wallace 1954), the long-absent alien species responsible for spreading humankind throughout the galaxy feels shame, while the alien piloting the human-crewed ship that makes this discovery feels sorry for us.
Becky Chambers writes good sci-fi novels with aliens who are trying to get along despite their differences. Try The Galaxy, and the Ground Within.
I like Becky Chambers' work too. It's notable that the series doesn't shy away from showing unpleasant people (of any species) and attitudes, even though pretty much all the characters with, as it were, "speaking roles" are decent, humane (ironically) and thoughtful.
Has anyone mentioned the octopus-like aliens in 'Arrival', a film I'm rather fond of?
I reviewed that film on the ship's movie thread when it first came out. It was well-made, but as I said at the time, I didn't buy the 25-words-for-snow linguistic theories underlying the plot(*).
(*) Which I learned via the discussion is formally called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.
The aliens whom WE encounter are all malevolent because the good ones avoid us like the plague.
Sensible creatures...
Seriously, it's an interesting hypothesis--or I suppose I should say, it would be, if we were discussing real encounters that have already happened instead of fiction!
Has anyone mentioned the octopus-like aliens in 'Arrival', a film I'm rather fond of?
I reviewed that film on the ship's movie thread when it first came out. It was well-made, but as I said at the time, I didn't buy the 25-words-for-snow linguistic theories underlying the plot(*).
(*) Which I learned via the discussion is formally called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.
Another movie in which the aliens are shown as bringing peace to earthlings is the 2007 version of Invasion Of The Body Snatchers, called just The Invasion. Except the message is ultimately that this pacifistic utopia can only be attained by lobotomizing everyone and killing the people who remain unaffected by the peace- bearing virus.
(I believe the aliens in the first movie were stand-in for Communists, and I can't quite recall if there was a recognizable political agenda in the 1979 version. I was rather unimpressed with the alien methodolgy in the first, where they literally snatch the bodies away at night, and truck in replacement bodies. I thought the emergence of the virus in the 2007 version was rather well handled.)
@stetson: the strong version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis has been abandoned by most linguists. Last time I checked, the jury was still out on the weaker version.
All the aliens we encounter in SF have been created by human writers. Now that we have a wider range of people writing SF, we are indeed getting more stories about cooperative aliens instead of the clichéd alien invaders.
It's taken us so long to recognise sentience in other Earth creatures that we may not actually notice when (if) we meet real, intelligent aliens. They might look like rocks or trees or clouds of gas. They might prefer to deal with a different Earth species and either ignore or exterminate us. If they bother to come here at all...
Why are S ci-fi 'aliens' almost invariably malevolent?
Because action movies require an enemy, and with the film industry being more and more global and societies becoming more and more multicultural it’s getting harder to find human nations or societies that will play well as the baddies in every market.
Why are S ci-fi 'aliens' almost invariably malevolent?
Because action movies require an enemy, and with the film industry being more and more global and societies becoming more and more multicultural it’s getting harder to find human nations or societies that will play well as the baddies in every market.
That's seems a little facile as analysis, sci-fi films are a tiny part of the market and there are plenty of other genres which feature villains of various kinds.
I think there’s something in it though for that subset of action films which involve larger scale conflict and the involvement of the military, or a violent resistance movement.
If you’re in the Hollywood business and you’re going to make a film about a major assault on America or on part of it by a malign power, who do you choose as your malign power?
If you’re in the Hollywood business and you’re going to make a film about a major assault on America or on part of it by a malign power, who do you choose as your malign power?
If you’re in the Hollywood business and you’re going to make a film about a major assault on America or on part of it by a malign power, who do you choose as your malign power?
I'm not a massive film buff, but afaict occasions of a film shifting from one genre to another like this is fairly rare (especially to one still considered 'niche').
Military films as a genre seem fairly situated in the 'universe as it is'; with the large action films being dramatisations of the past, and those set in the present/near future having more small scale suspenseful plots. There are probably Cold War era films that break this mould, but they seem few and far between.
Why are S ci-fi 'aliens' almost invariably malevolent?
The common, prosaic, answer is that many of the sci-fi authors of the 20th century, and their readers, were men who grew up contemplating the prospect of war.
Back in the 50s and 60s there were a lot more movies with bad aliens, but novels and comics and such have quite a diverse array of aliens. (Superman, of course, but the vast majority of the Green Lantern Corps (partly inspired by the Lensman novel series) are not only aliens, but hundreds of different kinds of aliens, some of them downright freaky. There are crystal creatures, at least one bacterium, and then there’s Mogo, who doesn’t socialize much because
he’s an actual sapient planet, and his gravitational field would mess with stuff if he came to gatherings
and the like. And the 30th century Legion of Super-Heroes, most of whom aren’t from Earth. Marvel has countless non-villain aliens as well.)
All the aliens we encounter in SF have been created by human writers.
So far as we know…
😂 True. But I would have thought the lizards were too busy running the world to spend time writing books and film scripts.
In any case, SF (like all fiction) holds up a mirror to ourselves. We can't draw any conclusions from it about how an alien will react to first contact. All it tells us is how we *might* react. It's not surprising that a lot of 'classic' SF from the mid-20th century is about hostile aliens. Modern writers like Adrian Tchaikovsky and Becky Chambers take a more nuanced view.
I wonder how humanity would react to finding out that aliens consider us irrelevant?
I think the phenomenon is more to be found in movies than in books. Several classic sci-fi authors frequently wrote about rather nice aliens, such as James White in the "Hospital Station" stories, Andre Norton in many novels, Arthur Clarke in "Rescue Party", Robert Heinlein in "The Star Beast" and "Between Planets" (although he also had some scary aliens) and plenty more.
... All the aliens we encounter in SF have been created by human writers.
Unless you have some other information to which the rest of us do not have access, that is inevitable.
Now that we have a wider range of people writing SF, we are indeed getting more stories about cooperative aliens instead of the clichéd alien invaders. ...
So, do you know something about the wider range of more recent SF writers that the rest of us don't know?!
I suppose it might now be a question whether the advent of AI authors will mean that computers will produce SF written from a different perspective. Their output so far, though, leaves little reason to hope that anything AI produces is going to be even readable, yet alone interesting or pleasurable to read.
So, do you know something about the wider range of more recent SF writers that the rest of us don't know?!
You just need to glance at the list of Hugo/Nebula/similar award winners and nominees to see that there's a greater range of people of both sexes and ethnicities writing Science Fiction and Fantasy.
You just need to glance at the list of Hugo/Nebula/similar award winners and nominees to see that there's a greater range of people of both sexes and ethnicities writing Science Fiction and Fantasy.
The point I was making was that unless Jane R had other knowledge the rest of us don't have, all SF, however diverse the writers may be, has been written by human writers. There is none, so far as you, I or anyone else knows, that was written by extraterrestrial aliens. Nobody knows what they might contribute to the genre should they even wish to do so.
You just need to glance at the list of Hugo/Nebula/similar award winners and nominees to see that there's a greater range of people of both sexes and ethnicities writing Science Fiction and Fantasy.
The point I was making was that unless Jane R had other knowledge the rest of us don't have, all SF, however diverse the writers may be, has been written by human writers
@Jane R can speak for herself, but her point seemed reasonable clear and it didn't seem to be the one you were ascribing to her here.
If you’re in the Hollywood business and you’re going to make a film about a major assault on America or on part of it by a malign power, who do you choose as your malign power?
Russia
AFF
Just watched
Black Bag. Interestingly, the villain IS Russian, but it's implied he is anti-Putin, and planning horrific crimes against his homeland that will annihilate hundreds of thousands.
As often with Soderberg, I found it artistically underwhelming, but I won't go any further off-topic here.
The thing is, someone writing SF has a purpose, and it is rarely simply to imagine what aliens might be like. There is also a reason behind the story, and much of the time (in a lot of the fundamental works of the genre) it is to reflect something in our society.
And in our society, most of the time, when we encounter something "alien", we treat it with suspicion and hostility.
As has been pointed out, not all aliens are malevolent, but where they are, it is because we have made them in our image. Because the author is trying to show us what it would be like to meet us. Us being humans generally, or White Westerners specifically.
Growing up with the Dr Who the classic series I was presented with good, bad and indifferent aliens. The Doctor himself is an alien. He has gone to far sometimes. So I would say no, not all aliens are malevolent in Sci Fi.
Growing up with the Dr Who the classic series I was presented with good, bad and indifferent aliens. The Doctor himself is an alien. He has gone to far sometimes. So I would say no, not all aliens are malevolent in Sci Fi.
I've never watched Dr. Who, but I think I get the general gist of it. I wasn't aware that the Doctor is an alien. Is he/she presented as such in any meaningful way, eg. biology or physical powers different from a human?
Superman is also, technically, an alien, but I think is usually just interpreted, like the name implies, as an extraordinary man. IOW basically human, but with exceptional powers.
I've never watched Dr. Who, but I think I get the general gist of it. I wasn't aware that the Doctor is an alien. Is he/she presented as such in any meaningful way, eg. biology or physical powers different from a human?
The Doctor - pronouns "she/her" currently - has access to and understands advanced technology and can turn into a different actor instead of dying. She also has two hearts.
Depending on the writer she also occasionally has new alien powers as the plot demands - egregious examples being a respiratory bypass system that meant he couldn't be strangled at least until the next cliffhanger, and the ability to expel a dose of lethal radiation from his toe.
I've never watched Dr. Who, but I think I get the general gist of it. I wasn't aware that the Doctor is an alien. Is he/she presented as such in any meaningful way, eg. biology or physical powers different from a human?
The Doctor - pronouns "she/her" currently - has access to and understands advanced technology and can turn into a different actor instead of dying. She also has two hearts.
Depending on the writer she also occasionally has new alien powers as the plot demands - egregious examples being a respiratory bypass system that meant he couldn't be strangled at least until the next cliffhanger, and the ability to expel a dose of lethal radiation from his toe.
I can’t add much to this. He is a Time Lord. As mentioned he has the ability to regenerate. He has two hearts which has helped him escape a couple times.
Comments
Because "people from Earth meet people from other planets, and everyone gets along" makes for a boring movie, book, or TV show.
I don't think your premise is true even for mass-market movie Scifi, though. Consider Avatar, for example. The aliens are the good guys, and the malevolent people in the story are some of the humans.
Blake's Seven included a very supportive alien in the telepath Cally.
Well, it gives the usual disgraced scientist person a chance to save the world, along with his or her family, of course.
(I guess I watch too many films of that genre...)
Close Encounters Of The Third Kind has benevolent aliens and slightly malevolent government agents, as does the same director's E.T.
Off the top of my head, I think War Of The Worlds is the only time Spielberg has featured ill-intentioned aliens.
Knowing from the late 2000s also has benevolent aliens, trying to help humanity survive a terminal heat wave, though they seem somewhat sinister prior to the revelation of their mission. (Underrated film, in my opinion.)
Lovecraft, H.G. Wells, et al - people love to be spooked by what they don't understand. And extra terrestrial beings are like the epitome of what we don't understand.
AFF
The aliens can be seen as a frighteningly more extreme version of ourselves.
They aren't. Well-written sci-fi has complex aliens with a variety of of temperaments and motivations.
Yes, the aliens in Knowing come as something of a surprise.
Well, yes, in many popular sci-fi films what is played out is 'what if the aliens treated us like we treated other people'.
I don't quite recall that sequence. Is that one of the disasters predicted by the little girl in her time-capsule note?
I did REALLY like the scene of the plane crash on the highway.
H.G. Wells laid down that moral template in WotW, and the Spielberg film picks up on it by having the protagonist's young daughter writing an essay on French colonialism in Algeria.
Here's the train derailment clip:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzocwDE3VK4
It was the bacteria that ultimately won in the Spielberg version as well(granted after a lot of the tossed-in action stuff you mention). The tripods started stumbling about in the street, and then they collapse with the hatches opening and dead aliens drenched in fluid come pouring out. Morgan Freeman then intones the darwinian lesson about staying away from places you don't belong.
I've seen the 1953 version, but don't remember it as well, except the leading man's pickup line involving his eyeglasses. What I found interesting about the Spielberg film was what one critic framed as the seeming intent to give the audience the feel that they're encountering the idea of an alien invasion for the first time. While the shoot-em-up stuff is definitely there, the invasion itself is handled with more subtlety, I found. IIRC, we first see them when Cruise goes out to his suburban street sees them pounding holes in the concrete.
Jeff Wayne did it best…
It's also possible that sci-fi authors subconsciously recognise that we live in a dark forest.
I like Becky Chambers' work too. It's notable that the series doesn't shy away from showing unpleasant people (of any species) and attitudes, even though pretty much all the characters with, as it were, "speaking roles" are decent, humane (ironically) and thoughtful.
I reviewed that film on the ship's movie thread when it first came out. It was well-made, but as I said at the time, I didn't buy the 25-words-for-snow linguistic theories underlying the plot(*).
(*) Which I learned via the discussion is formally called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.
Sensible creatures...
Seriously, it's an interesting hypothesis--or I suppose I should say, it would be, if we were discussing real encounters that have already happened instead of fiction!
Lewis of course thought we were quarantined.
Another movie in which the aliens are shown as bringing peace to earthlings is the 2007 version of Invasion Of The Body Snatchers, called just The Invasion. Except the message is ultimately that this pacifistic utopia can only be attained by lobotomizing everyone and killing the people who remain unaffected by the peace- bearing virus.
(I believe the aliens in the first movie were stand-in for Communists, and I can't quite recall if there was a recognizable political agenda in the 1979 version. I was rather unimpressed with the alien methodolgy in the first, where they literally snatch the bodies away at night, and truck in replacement bodies. I thought the emergence of the virus in the 2007 version was rather well handled.)
All the aliens we encounter in SF have been created by human writers. Now that we have a wider range of people writing SF, we are indeed getting more stories about cooperative aliens instead of the clichéd alien invaders.
It's taken us so long to recognise sentience in other Earth creatures that we may not actually notice when (if) we meet real, intelligent aliens. They might look like rocks or trees or clouds of gas. They might prefer to deal with a different Earth species and either ignore or exterminate us. If they bother to come here at all...
Because action movies require an enemy, and with the film industry being more and more global and societies becoming more and more multicultural it’s getting harder to find human nations or societies that will play well as the baddies in every market.
That's seems a little facile as analysis, sci-fi films are a tiny part of the market and there are plenty of other genres which feature villains of various kinds.
If you’re in the Hollywood business and you’re going to make a film about a major assault on America or on part of it by a malign power, who do you choose as your malign power?
Russia
AFF
I'm not a massive film buff, but afaict occasions of a film shifting from one genre to another like this is fairly rare (especially to one still considered 'niche').
Military films as a genre seem fairly situated in the 'universe as it is'; with the large action films being dramatisations of the past, and those set in the present/near future having more small scale suspenseful plots. There are probably Cold War era films that break this mould, but they seem few and far between.
So far as we know…
and the like. And the 30th century Legion of Super-Heroes, most of whom aren’t from Earth. Marvel has countless non-villain aliens as well.)
😂 True. But I would have thought the lizards were too busy running the world to spend time writing books and film scripts.
In any case, SF (like all fiction) holds up a mirror to ourselves. We can't draw any conclusions from it about how an alien will react to first contact. All it tells us is how we *might* react. It's not surprising that a lot of 'classic' SF from the mid-20th century is about hostile aliens. Modern writers like Adrian Tchaikovsky and Becky Chambers take a more nuanced view.
I wonder how humanity would react to finding out that aliens consider us irrelevant?
The closest analogy to the Sector General series is probably something like Deep Space Nine.
I suppose it might now be a question whether the advent of AI authors will mean that computers will produce SF written from a different perspective. Their output so far, though, leaves little reason to hope that anything AI produces is going to be even readable, yet alone interesting or pleasurable to read.
You just need to glance at the list of Hugo/Nebula/similar award winners and nominees to see that there's a greater range of people of both sexes and ethnicities writing Science Fiction and Fantasy.
@Jane R can speak for herself, but her point seemed reasonable clear and it didn't seem to be the one you were ascribing to her here.
Just watched
As often with Soderberg, I found it artistically underwhelming, but I won't go any further off-topic here.
And in our society, most of the time, when we encounter something "alien", we treat it with suspicion and hostility.
As has been pointed out, not all aliens are malevolent, but where they are, it is because we have made them in our image. Because the author is trying to show us what it would be like to meet us. Us being humans generally, or White Westerners specifically.
I've never watched Dr. Who, but I think I get the general gist of it. I wasn't aware that the Doctor is an alien. Is he/she presented as such in any meaningful way, eg. biology or physical powers different from a human?
Superman is also, technically, an alien, but I think is usually just interpreted, like the name implies, as an extraordinary man. IOW basically human, but with exceptional powers.
Like Ming The Merciless in Flash Gordon, who apparently rules over a planet whose name seems an allusion to "Mongol hordes".
Depending on the writer she also occasionally has new alien powers as the plot demands - egregious examples being a respiratory bypass system that meant he couldn't be strangled at least until the next cliffhanger, and the ability to expel a dose of lethal radiation from his toe.
I can’t add much to this. He is a Time Lord. As mentioned he has the ability to regenerate. He has two hearts which has helped him escape a couple times.