The most alien aliens

I've decided I'm not going to write about my neuroses around sharing my writing on social media and otherwise. I'm just going to tell you: I wrote an essay that's special to me, and that's what this letter is about.

The essay is about how we imagine alien life, in science and in stories. It was extremely mentally satisfying to pull threads from so many stories I've read and seen throughout my life—the Sue Burke novel I read a few weeks ago, the Vernor Vinge audiobook Tanner and I listened to on a road trip somewhere, Arrival, Avatar, an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation that I hadn't seen since it aired literally twenty-five years ago, but which I somehow always remembered, and thought of every so often, until I found myself ready to write about it in the midst of half a dozen other things.

I happened to have re-read the His Dark Materials series recently, and wrote a bit in this essay about the mulefa, which sadly had to be cut for space, because there are infinite alien inventions, and I already wanted to write about too many of them. I loved the mulefa (and Mary! give me a whole book about Mary Malone!) dearly on this re-read; here's what I wrote in terms of the science Pullman built for them:

In The Amber Spyglass, Philip Pullman gives us sentient, non-humanoid aliens with a robust evolutionary logic. They are in a parallel reality, not on another planet, but nevermind that. The mulefa are four-legged, like Earth’s grazing animals, but with their limbs in a diamond shape—one front, one back, and two on the sides. Pullman fits the mulefa into a web of evolutionary synchronicity: they have large claws on their front and rear legs, which they fit into the holes in the large, spherical seed pods of a local tree. Pullman writes, “The creatures hooked a claw through the center of the pods with their front and rear legs, and used their two lateral legs to push against the ground and move along.” The mulefa can travel on wheels because their native grassland is streaked with smooth bands of volcanic rock, like rivers or roads. The mulefa tend the seed-pod trees and—this is a fantasy novel—receive from the seed-pod oil some push toward intelligence and sentience. It’s an intertwined interdependence that echoes many of the evolved symbiotic relationships on Earth.

There’s something satisfying about the depth of Pullman’s imagining here, the full picture of how a non-humanoid animal could have the communicative and dextrous abilities we see as essential to our own intelligent evolution. (The mulefa have no hands but they have nimble trunks, which they use as hands for work and as a part of their language.) Just like the heptapods of Arrival, or the movie Alien’s xenomorphs, they are satisfying because they are so strange, yet plausible. Oh, we think, that’s how it could actually be.

It's all about that strange, pleasurable feeling of imagining something alien and plausible, though if we ever encounter real alien life, it will just as likely be confounding. It will be terrifying, or transcendent, or both.

There's so much more to write about this than 2500 words, but here's a start (this is the essay): How We Imagine Aliens. (It's part of Medium's members-only content, but you get three free articles a month—hopefully you have one left.) 

I also learned that the line "consider the coconut" in Moana was a deliberate reference by Lin-Manuel Miranda to the David Foster Wallace essay "Consider the Lobster." That's a beautiful thing.

xxo
Jaime