Now lets turn to the aliens that are not native to this planet. What will happen when we meet them...unless you believe we already have.

Will they be superior to us? Inferior? Who will be the masters? Who will be the slaves?Just who will eat whom? Remember the Twilight Zone episode, "To Serve Man"?

When humans meet aliens in SF, there is often conflict. Sometimes the aliens invade, attack and massacre (check xenophobia in the dictionary). HG Wells' War of the Worlds is a perfect example of this kind of invasion. Wells' aliens are hostile, uncommunicative and strange. They seem irresistibly technologically superior, but are defeated by something quintessentially Terran (I won't give away the ending). Wells' story was so realistic, and tapped fears that run so deep, that its radio broadcast caused a famous panic .

Sometimes in SF, there are other kinds of encounters--sometimes the aliens are gentle and kind, or simple and primitive, and it's up to us to love and help and save them(). This is evidence of a different kind of attitude towards aliens, and again, a different kind of attitude toward "us."

One of the measures of good SF is the creativity and consistency of its aliens. Good SF imagines aliens that are truly alien, but also truly fully imagined as plausible beings and three-dimensional literary characters. Bad SF too often succumbs to the "funny ears syndrome," where the aliens are just like us with silly makeup on. Or worse, the aliens are impossible to understand, because they don't behave in any reasonable way, and thus can't be interesting.

Good SF writers have a lot of leeway to design radically different aliens.

This is the area in which we find some of the most powerful and permanent images in all SF. No one who has ever encountered them can ever forget Vernor Vinge's wolf-like, hive-minded creatures from A Fire Upon the Deep, or George Lucas' Jabba the Hut from Star Wars, or John W. Campbell's "Thing," from "Who Goes There" (later adapted in Ridley Scott's Alien).

Which aliens do you remember the most clearly (or imagine). What kind of body, what kind of mind, and what ends up being your definition of human?

Go to the discussion board and let us know.