The Four Frontiers Of ‘Alien’

This article offers a new perspective on the behavior and society of non-humans and how they might interact with a human culture. Image by Greg Montani from Pixabay
The First Frontier: Appearance
Early science fiction depicted aliens as having animal heads or other elements of animal anatomy. Fantasy, myth, and legend carry the principle even further back in time – the Minotaur of Knossos comes to mind. And I would not be at all surprised to be told that centaurs predate even those tales.
I can picture the scene in my head – the first time a tribe who has not achieved it witnesses riders from a tribe that has domesticated or ‘broken’ horses, perhaps clinging to the mane or around the neck (because the bit, bridle, and reigns have not yet been invented) and the results are so outside their experience that they blend the two into a single creature. And at the speed of a galloping horse, even moderate cover would have the pair out of sight in fairly short order – making a correction to the impression that much less likely to occur.
But most of those early creations (there are some notable exceptions) cross only the first frontier of ‘alien’: appearance. Biologically, Culturally, Socially, and in their relations with humans both as individuals and as a Society, these are no more than humans in rubber masks.
The Second Frontier: Biology
One of the first massively-popular novels to actually advance this minimum threshold is HG Well’s ‘War Of The Worlds’, first published in 1898. The martians not only looked a lot more alien than a humanoid with a strange head, they had a different biological inheritance – even though their basic biology was obviously the same as ours (otherwise, they would not have been susceptible to terrestrial diseases).
You could say that Wells advanced to the very brink of crossing the second frontier, Biology, but lacked the knowledge to cross it (or felt that his audience had insufficient foundation to accept anything further – and he might have been right).
Even today, writers and GMs have to occasionally curb their creativity, limiting it to what they can communicate to their audience in a timely fashion – for writers, that’s an editor and his readers, for a GM it’s his or her players.
Nevertheless, by the time that the great pulp magazines arose and began publishing science fiction, some noteworthy authors had began to envisage alien biologies that went beyond humans – at first, simply by tacking on biological traits from the animals whose heads adorned human bodies.
Feline races weren’t just fur-covered, they began to exhibit other feline traits, and the same was true of every other hybrid concept out there. Once the threshold had been crossed – and I don’t know who was the first to do so, or in what story – even by a little, it became a matter of slow and steady progress for the terrestrial shackles to be thrown off.
The author I read most frequently from this era is EE ‘Doc’ Smith, and he definitely had a toe (if not an entire foot) over that boundary.
By the time of James White’s Sector General series, writers were so far beyond that frontier that they could barely see the border checkpoint in the distance behind them. It was no longer acceptable for a competent writer to simply slap an alien head on an otherwise humanoid creature – an alien head meant alien senses, alien diseases, and other attributes of non-human biology.
The Third Frontier: Psychology & Behavior
EE ‘Doc’ Smith’s creations (in the Lensman series more than the early Skylark stories) also flirted with the Third Frontier, but in an extremely limited way – the individuals were humans with exaggerated psychological situations which existed for one of two reasons: as an outgrowth of environment or unusual senses; or to make them seem more alien.
The latter was a perennial problem for decades. Certainly, it persisted into the 1980s in some quarters and in some media. Does anyone remember the complaints that the aliens in Star Trek: The Next Generation were just humans in forehead appliances? There were times when the complaint was richly justified, especially in the early season or two, but they slowly inched past the problem now and then – only to beat a hasty retreat in the next episode, or so it often seemed.
That’s one of the reasons I was a bigger fan of Deep Space Nine than of Next-Gen; the aliens in DS9 were more fully realized, more rounded, and more adventurous, conceptually. Voyager started off more akin to Next-Gen in this respect, chock full of aliens that weren’t alien except in ways that made no logical sense, like the Kazon, an interstellar species that was hamstrung and left too primitive to justify their having space flight by a lack of…. water? – but also got better as it went along (with the occasional regression).
If they were planet-bound, this might have made sense. As soon as you give them starships, given how prevalent water is in the universe, they stop making sense.
Isaac Asimov once stated that the reason so few aliens appear in his stories is because he found it hard trying to work out how they would think, and didn’t want to do the kind of hatchet-job aliens that populated the worst science-fiction of his era (not an exact quote, I’ve paraphrased quite a bit). It’s noteworthy that outside of the original Foundation trilogy and his Robot stories, my favorite Asimov is The Gods Themselves – in which he does feature aliens with not only an alien biology, but a society which is justified by the strangeness of the biology, and an alien psychology (with just enough resonance with human behavior to be comprehensible) that fits both.
Which shows that there was the occasional work that crosses the frontier, even while the ‘mainstream’ persisted in more …limited… expressions of creativity in the area (to put a gentle face on it).
Even famous and popular works like “2001: A Space Odyssey” suffer from this problem – aliens behaving strangely because that’s “alien”.
This all betrays a human-centric perception of reality that was slow to fade (and still lingers in some corners). The notion that all ‘alien thought processes’ take an aspect of human behavior and amplify it beyond what is reasonable, implies that humans are the centrists, the perfect compromise between extremes.
Nevertheless, aided by TV shows such as Babylon-5 and an accumulated body of exemplars (like the works of Larry Niven), creators slowly moved beyond these being exceptions and made aliens with a rational psychology borne out of environment and physical capabilities the ‘acceptable standard’.
RPGs are very much at the threshold of this transition right now. D&D and 2nd Ed were very strongly ‘humans in strange bodies’. 3e began to expand beyond that, as had many specific articles in The Dragon over the years, but this was still very much just the occasional flirtation. I haven’t read 4e, so I can’t comment on it, but Pathfinder 1st Ed was contemporary with it, and while it flirts with the third frontier of Alien more frequently, and more consistently, and even crosses it a time or two, it’s inconsistent. Even D&D 5e advances just an inch or two, still not crossing that line.
Science Fiction RPGs are often even less advanced for the most part – many of them are still stuck in the ‘humans in strange bodies’ or ‘humans with animal heads’ stage. There are some exceptions out there, which I will continue to laud when I encounter them!
That presents GMs with a huge opportunity. Take Orcs, as an example – beyond the information in the core rulebooks, there’s a gulf of undescribed social and behavioral patterns and realms. Put those together in an appropriate and self-consistent way that the players can discover, and you immediately elevate your game above the typical.
The more races that you treat this way, the richer your campaign world becomes, and the higher into the ranks of the elite GMs you climb. Of course, there’s only so far that this enhancement can take you, before other aspects of the GM’s craft become limiting factors – but this is a fun and (relatively) easy way to give a game a serious leg up – but be warned, it can be a never-ending job!
(For those who might ask me to put my money where my mouth is, or who want a practical real-world example of the richness that can result from this creativity, check out the Orcs and Elves series here at Campaign Mastery – but be warned, it’s NOT short (and still unfinished)).
The Fourth Frontier: Cultures, Societies, and Inter-species Relationships
No, I’m not talking about Riker (or Kirk) getting intimate with the attractive alien of the week!
I am talking about the generalization of individual behavioral traits into a consistent cultural and social structure (something that I hinted at in the previous section), and of a bigger issue: how one species interacts with, and relates to, another.
Science Fiction writers have been ‘going there’ almost as long as they’ve been crossing the Third Frontier, or at least trying to – the imagination needs some foundation to build on, and there hasn’t really been enough state of the art for them to advance too far.
We have, after all, only the one technological civilization to study, and even that one we understand extremely imperfectly.
Slowly, the boundaries of ignorance are being peeled back. And by bringing together discoveries in a great many fields, the speculative creator can start to reason his way to the fourth frontier by analogy. It’s not much, but it’s a start.
There have always been philosophical debates and discussion over the way humans would interact with alien societies; it’s been a matter of serious (theoretical) study from the first SETI proposals, back in the 1970s. But it’s largely been abstract and without strong foundation in reality, or been far to human-centric, based on the interactions of one human culture with another (and presuming that nothing had been learned from those experiences). Now, that’s changing, thanks to a growing understanding of the relationship between humans and the animals that they have domesticated, which provides a whole new perspective on the inevitable questions.
GMs willing to put the research and skull-sweat into their creations now have the opportunity to advance not only beyond the Third Frontier (where only the best games dare to tread), but to cross the Fourth Frontier Of Alien.
Which brings me to the inspiration for this article – a question on Quora about the way (domesticated) dogs perceive humans, and an answer that went far beyond my own understanding of the subject. I had previously seen something similar about how cats perceived humans that was interesting but less authoritative, so I was primed.
I’ll get to the specifics in a moment. First, I have to acknowledge that I’m reading FAR more into the answer than the author intended, and second, to thank him for granting permission to reproduce his answer in full, below. Nathan Stevenson is a Dog Enthusiast and presently studying Canine Psychology, which makes his answer authoritative in my book!
Question: “When a dog bonds to a human, what kind of relationship does the dog think of it as? Does it think of the human as its puppy, mother, sibling, or another dog?”
The person raising the question, Pedro Gracia, then goes on to credit another Quora user, Paul S Cilva, for a similar question which was modified to the above.
(There are 11 other answers at this page).
Nathan wrote, in response:
Dogs do not see humans as other dogs. They are intelligent enough to realize that we are another species, since dogs mostly communicate with body language that we really can’t mimic. We don’t have tails or snouts, we can’t move our ears and we have half the requisite number of legs. Trying to communicate like a dog will probably only make your dog confused, and also make you look hilarious and you might even end up on a viral video if you’re particularly (un)lucky.
As for what a dog sees a bonded human as, I’d say the closest thing would be a leader. Domesticated dogs have human interaction basically hard-baked into their lives, and dogs have been so bred and conditioned over the centuries that human contact is basically a requisite. As such, dogs quickly learn that humans are a good source of food, shelter and comfort, but they are also the ones who know how the world works, and as such it tends to be a good idea to do what they say. When a dog knows exactly how to react to a given situation thanks to their human they will trust that human more. Alongside providing the dog with food, shelter and comfort, the human will gradually build the dogs’ trust and the bond will be formed.
Dogs do not see us as other dogs, and since there is a species difference there is no concept of being dominant over each other. Dogs should respect and obey their humans, but they will only do so if the trust and the bond is there.
Applied Theory
My first thought, on reading this, wasn’t actually about Canine Bipeds – it was about Kobolds, a (fictional) species that is smart enough to recognize that humans can communicate with bodily language that their lizard-based biology can’t replicate – they would have limited expressive capability, and might well have restricted vocal capacities, to boot. Kobold, as a language, would evolve far beyond hissing sibilants.
I then came across a post in the Traveler RPG Facebook Group which mentioned canine-headed aliens. And that made me think of Felines, and Ursoids, and all the other humanoid aliens with unusual heads (or unusual bodies with human heads) that humans have been inventive enough to create.
And that thought reminded me of a documentary I once watched on the intelligence of Octopi – no link, I’m afraid – which suggested (and demonstrated) that while they almost certainly didn’t have sufficient brains to be sentient, they had far greater problem-solving skills than most non-hominids, more even than some ape species.
While Dolphins and similar species may have greater intelligence, Octopi have limbs capable of manipulating tools and controls that these other aquatic species lack – and that may give them a greater practical applied intelligence than the dolphins.
And that reminded me of the Hyver that I once played in a traveler campaign, who saw it as his task to “domesticate” the other members of the crew (since he was clearly the superior life-form).
Hyvers are an interesting species to reference, because they are the only traveler race that isn’t humanoid. And so this was a memory that led me back to the answer by Nathan, and how it might be relevant to the handling of alien (i.e. non-human) species in roleplaying games, both fantasy and science-fiction in orientation.
A [highly speculative] History Of Domestication
I almost always have a rough plan in mind for these articles before I start; sometimes I have something even more formal or comprehensive. Almost every section in last week’s article on wood was pre-planned, both in the context of inclusion, and in terms of having a rough idea of what the content would be about and how one section would flow into the next. The few exceptions were add-ins placed in the middle of existing lists covering some application that I hadn’t thought of.
Today’s article has been somewhat different – I had a general notion of the overall structure, and bits and pieces of how it would fit together, but less of a coherent plan. As a result, this section was left out even though I had intended to discuss the subject – it would have simply gotten in the way and side-tracked the flow of the article, taking attention away from the points that I really wanted to make.
One of the abiding impressions from the answer is that Dogs have been domesticated for a very long time – and that cats haven’t been domesticated for anywhere near the same length of time.
We know that domesticated cats were treated royally in ancient Egypt (where they had the cat-headed deity, Bast). So if the above is correct, dogs must have been first domesticated in pre-history.
That makes sense to me – I imagine the story went something like this: A hunter catches a wild dog (scaring off the rest of the pack, somehow) and tethers it to a peg or stick or branch outside his dwelling – whether that be a cave or an adobe hut – because he can always eat the dog if he gets hungry, but in the meantime, it will react to anyone or anything approaching that might threaten his safety. To keep the dog alive while it is still useful, he feeds it. This may have been the pattern for a long time, or the story may have advanced relatively quickly; it doesn’t matter much.
What probably happened was that a dog pulled free of the tether, but instead of running off to freedom and an uncertain diet of whatever he could catch, chose to stay. The hunter observed this, and left the dog free when he left for the day’s hunt – only to find the dog following him / accompanying him.
It might be fanciful, but that’s the way that I see the partnership between dog and man beginning. The hunter may well have been Neanderthal or even more primitive – but it was a long time ago, I think.
So I thought it might be useful to actually see what Wikipedia has to say on the subject of domesticated animals, especially historically – just to see how close to the mark my speculation was. Consider it a logic check on the whole article, in a way.
According to the Domestication Of Animals page, “The dog was the first to be domesticated and was established across Eurasia before the end of the Late Pleistocene era, well before cultivation and before the domestication of other animals” – and the Late Pleistocene is an unofficial designation between the start of the last Ice Age and the end of the preceding one – which is when Neanderthals were the dominant humanoid species in Eurasia.
They were followed by the first domesticated livestock – goats, pigs, sheep, and cattle. About 5000 years later, the horse followed, and about 1500 years later, the cat and the chicken – at least 11,000 years after the dog, in about 2000BC.
It’s also important to note the difference (heavily emphasized at the start of the Wikipedia page) between domestication and taming – the latter is what I have provided a speculative account of; domestication involves the genetic manipulation of the species through selective breeding to the point of achieving a different, specific, subspecies adapted to the needs of the partnership.
How long before they were domesticated were humans taming and training wild dogs? I don’t know, but suspect that it was a fair while – innovations seemed to come fairly slowly back then! But, at the same time, I suspect that it was fairly inevitable. It probably started with a conversation: “Your dog is good at guarding. Mine is good at hunting. If they breed with each other instead of a wild dog, maybe we will get puppies that are good at both.”
This is relevant when you compare the degree of adaption to a human partnership. Cats have been domesticated for about 4000 years,.and are still relatively independent; humans are largely a convenience. Dogs have been domesticated for between 15 and 30,000 years.
I wanted to try and convert that into generations – but it’s not that easy.
Cat years to human years: 2+y(c) = approx 25+4*y(h).
Which is to say that the first 2 years of a cat’s life are roughly equivalent to the first 25 years of a human life, and each year thereafter is roughly equivalent to 4 human years. The feline equivalent of a centurian is therefore (100-25)/4+2 = 20.75 years. But a Feline generation is going to be less than that first two years – maybe a year and a half. So that gives us roughly 2667 generations of domesticated cats.
Things get even more complicated for dogs. The first year is ~15 human years (and a generation, by the same rough standard used for cats); the second year is ~9 human years; and each year thereafter is about 5 human years. So that’s about 15,000 generations of domestic dogs.
Perhaps, 12,333 years from now, the cat will be as adapted to human partnership as the dog. Or perhaps there are psychological differences between the species, and cats will always have that air of independence about them. Without a crystal ball, who can tell?
The cow might give us a clue. It’s been a domestic animal for somewhere in between the two – but cow generations are a bit longer in real terms. A 1-year-old calf is the equivalent of about 14 years of age, so our “15-year generation” standard is a little older than that – about 1.074 years old. A 20-year-old cow is equivalent to 90 human years old – a 76/19 ratio, or roughly 4-to-one, the same as a cat. Yet, cattle are very domesticated compared to the cat – perhaps as domesticated as the dog, in the case of the females (bulls are a different matter). Hmm… that suggests both that there is such a ‘species’ factor, and that different genders can be ‘domesticated’ more quickly than each other – but here, I think the evidence is misleading us – Bulls are bred for qualities other than domestic tranquility!
If we accept that, and that dogs achieved their current state of domestication some time ago (it hasn’t only just happened), then we end up with a rather rubbery timeline in which 5000 years is roughly enough for complete domestication.
The Horse is therefore of interest in this respect – 3500 years of domestication, and they still have to be ‘broken’ or tamed. Either there will be a big shift in another 1500 years, or again we’ve been selecting for other things, or there is an inherent difference between species.
I justified including this section as a logic check on the deductions, and to put the answer by Nathan Stevenson into some context. I think that it’s done both jobs very well!
Which brings me to a long list of related links that might be of interest (generated with a series of Google & Duck-Duck-Go searches):
Cats:
- The Inner Life of Cats – Scientific American – By rubbing around our legs when they greet us, cats show that they regard us as friendly but at the same time slightly superior to them.
- Cats really do need their humans, even if they don’t show it – NBC News – You really are more than just a source of food to your cat: A study published [in September, 2019] finds that cats see their owners as a source of comfort and security, too.
- Cats Apparently Think Humans Are Bigger, Clumsy, Hairless Cats – Bustle.com – …what do cats think when they look at us? Well, according to some experts, cats might think humans are cats, too. Bigger, clumsier cats, sure – but cats nonetheless.
- What Do Cats Think About Us? You May Be Surprised – National Geographic – Cats learn specifically how their owners react when they make particular noises. So if the cat thinks, ‘I want to get my owner from the other room,’ …
- Do cats think humans are the pets – Quora (26 answers) – Strictly speaking, they see you as part of their colony, which is their extended family. Ideally, they should see you as the Queen (the head female and often the matriarch of all the other cats)…
- Deep Thoughts: What is Your Cat Thinking Throughout the Day? – Cat Care Of Vinings – …cats meow to humans, not other cats…[1]
[1] Some people to whom I have mentioned this factoid have disputed it, claiming to have heard cats meow to other cats. If you accept that cats only meow when a human is around to interpret the sound, the reports can be reconciled. Wild and Feral cats do not meow.
Bears:
- Bear Behaviour – Understanding black and grizzly bears – BearSmart.com – Bears are normally shy, retiring animals that have very little desire to interact with humans. Unless they are forced to be around humans to be near a food source, they usually choose to avoid us. Bears, like humans and other animals, have a ‘critical space’ – an area around them that they may defend.
- Dispelling Myths About Bears – BearSmart.com – Bears have fascinated humans for millennia. As one of the most adaptable and versatile mammals on earth, their behavior stirs fear, awe, wonder, and curiosity in us. Unfortunately, there are still many myths surrounding the lives and behavior of bears that negatively impact our relationships with them.
- What do bears think of campers & hikers? – Quora (8 answers) – To overgeneralize, black bears see humans as an aggressor and grizzly bears see humans as a threat.
- BEAR INTELLIGENCE – all-cretaures.org – …some even dare give them the equivalent intelligence of a 3-year-old human…
- Top 10 facts about polar bears – WWF – POLAR BEARS ARE ACTUALLY BLACK, NOT WHITE. Polar bear fur is translucent, and only appears white because it reflects visible light. Beneath all that thick fur, their skin is jet black.
Dolphins: [2]
- Dolphins often seem to want to befriend us – The Independent – Scientists don’t know why it happens, but tales of dolphins befriending humans reach far back into history. Aristotle wrote offhandedly about dolphins’ “passionate attachment to boys”, as if everyone just knew this as a fact.
- Protect Wild Dolphins: Admire Them from a Distance – NOAA Fisheries – Dolphins have a reputation for being friendly, but they are actually wild animals who should be treated with caution and respect. Interactions with people change dolphin behavior for the worse. They lose their natural wariness, which makes them easy targets for vandalism and shark attack.
- Are Dolphins Also Persons? – ABC News – …research shows that dolphins can at least think about the future.
- Whales and dolphins have rich ‘human-like’ cultures – Whales and dolphins (cetaceans) live in tightly-knit social groups, have complex relationships, talk to each other and even have regional dialects – much like human societies.
[2] I didn’t get an exact match to my search for “What do dolphins think of humans?” My personal theory, which might not be worth the time taken to expound it, is that they think we are oversized (depending on the species) calves, clumsy and perhaps backwards children to be protected and rescued when necessary, and played with – but not trusted with anything serious. Studies have found that dolphin calves ‘babble’ the same way human babies do – and no doubt that’s what humans attempting to make dolphin noises sound like to a real dolphin, too!
Octopi:
- Are Octopuses Smart? – Earthpedia – Earth.com – Octopuses are far smarter than they appear. They can solve mazes and remember people.
- Octopuses keep surprising us – here are eight examples – National History Museum UK – ‘I remember reading one [story] about a lab where all the fish were going missing from their tank,’ says Jon [Ablett, curator of the Museum’s cephalopod collection]. ‘The staff set up a little video camera and it turned out that one of the octopuses was getting out of its tank, going to the other tank, opening it, eating the fish, closing the lid, going back to its own tank and hiding the evidence.’
- Octlantis: the underwater city built by octopuses – The Guardian – The discovery of aquatic architecture has led scientists to compare the behavior of cephalopods to humans – but octopus city life is no utopia.
- Social Octopus Species Shatters Beliefs About Ocean Dwellers – The discovery of an octopus that lives in big groups is shattering even the most expansive ideas of known octopus behavior.
- What would an octopus society look like? – Worldbuilding – …this is way too general and opinion-based, but I will take a stab at it anyway…
- An invertebrate with flair – American Psychological Association – Last summer, staff at the Seattle Aquarium discovered that their new octopus had a talent for mischief. When they came to feed her or clean her tank, she would blow water jets in their direction…
- Armed with 10,000 more genes than humans – The Independent – Scientists have decoded the genome of the octopus and have discovered just how different it is to other intelligent creatures.
- What’s it like to be an octopus? “Their intelligence is like ours …” – Reddit – Octopuses are the closest we can come, on earth, to knowing what it might be like to encounter intelligent aliens.
Horses:
- How horses perceive and respond to human emotion – Medical News Today – A new study shows, for the very first time, that horses respond to human emotional cues by integrating the emotional value of the voice they hear with that of the facial expressions they see.
- Do Horses Like Humans? – Bustle.com – …new research … has found that the animals can not only recognize expressions but can also remember them and link them to a specific face. In other words, horses can recognize human faces and their emotional expressions, something that they then use to discern whether the person is a threat or not.
- What Do Horses Think We Humans Are? – Horse Illustrated – Horses know, from the moment they see you approach exactly which category you fall into: dangerous or non-threatening. If you are perceived to be dangerous, the horse will react out of self-preservation. He’ll be unpredictable and in many ways dangerous to you.
- Understanding horse intelligence – Features – Horsetalk.co.nz – Horses have evolved as prey animals. They are the hunted. Their instinctive flight response and much of their complex interaction within a herd have grown from this basic premise: escape or be eaten.
- What does a horse think about a human riding it? – Quora (5 Answers) – …really depends on the horse and how it was brought up and trained. Horses who are trained with empathy and patience love having a rider on their back.
- Read Before Riding: Horses Have Consciousness – National Geographic – “Mustangs think a little different from other horses”…
I think I’ll stop there – I’m not sure that snakes and spiders would provide much enlightenment, anyway, because of the size differential, and that’s enough to get everyone’s minds ticking over….
Until next time, have fun!
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