When I asked Banks about this he said I might be reading too much into the Behemothaurs (at least, more than he deliberately put there) but that my reading (in a book chapter on Banks that will be published this year sometime) was plausible.

Cold Allies is an excellent example of the type of aliens that convince me. It’s a stunning book.

But in Brother Termite, a very good novel, Anthony seems to be daring the reader NOT to believe. Her aliens are on the surface wide-eyed Grays straight out of the tabloids, and she includes weird National Enquirer — like asides like psychics that truly seem to be channeling great pianists and presidents. The book works for me anyway, more proof that a gifted writer can get me to buy almost anything for the duration of the book.

And my hero, Iain Banks? _All_ his aliens seem to be led on stage with a wink, and he seems to do as much research on their likely biology as he does for the physics of his FTL spaceships. S’okay with me. Banks is at play in the SF toy shop, and I’m just happy to watch.

It was in one of her books that I had an epiphany. She’s good with aliens that seem explicable but somehow off, and I realized that real people in contact with real aliens would have the same limitations as writers in contact with imaginary aliens: they would be unable to shake loose from modeling aliens as people, just with green skins. If I’m not just being nostalgic for long-ago sensawonder, part of Anthony’s schtick was asking what happens because of that failure of imagination.

The non-alien alien is one of my hot buttons, and it ruins a lot of science fiction for me.

It’s tempting to push this POV so far as to say that making aliens into characters is a mistake. They should be plot devices. Blindsight is a good example. Watts does a great job of showing how far technology may wind up molding “humanity” into nearly-unrecognizable shapes, and even then he admits that this is a grossly simplified view of their interactions and communication. The aliens provide a backdrop rather than being the guys in rubber masks.

Funny you mention Banks. I recently finished Look to Windward, and a major character is supposed to be a six-limbed sort-of feline. But damned if the Chelgrians (as the race is named) don’t have an absolutely human society, and the character’s thoughts, motivations, emotions, relationships, et blasted cetera would have been totally unaffected if he’d been an H. sap. I simply don’t understand why Banks didn’t skip the futzing around with alienhood and make the Chelgrians a bunch of non-Culture humans.

Peggy, you raise an interesting point — any time there’s anthropomorphizing going on, does the author intend that the narrator is unreliable? In most SF I’ve read the answer is No. (Somebody out there must have a bunch of examples, though.)

But if the author does show an awareness that the human characters are in essence fooling themselves, that’s an interesting point to make.

It’s kind of like what Tiptree did in SF — before Tiptree (and probably still), so many male writers’ attitudes about women were collections of unexamined assumptions — assumptions that were shared by (largely male) sf readers. But some of Tiptree’s best stories, like “The Women Men Don’t See” and “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” are about male characters who don’t realize that they projecting attributes onto women, and don’t understand how they’ve misunderstood the truth of the situation. But Tiptree knows, and the reader often realizes that as he was reading he was making the same mistake as the characters.

By the way, Tiptree’s a great example of using aliens for their metaphorical value. Not for a minute do I believe that that’s what real aliens would be like, but they’re useful as comments on the real world. In the Tiptree bio it mentions that Damon Knight was annoyed at Tiptree because he kept using the hoariest of SF tropes, but Tiptree didn’t care.