fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #6191 + 6192 ]

⌈ Secret Post #6191 + 6192 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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[Fionna and Cake]

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Notes:

Storms messing a lot of stuff up on the east coast. Yesterday + today early, just in case power/internet goes wonky.

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 26 secrets from Secret Submission Post #885.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

01. https://i.imgur.com/2cdKDeU.jpg

I love weird aliens too but this is an extremely strange take from someone who is supposedly interested in wildly different alien perspectives

you seriously can't imagine any reason why someone different from you would find 'humans in wildly different situations' to have a point, artistically or as an audience?

To explore how humans would react to an alien environment. And I'll tell you a secret - a lot of scifi is allegory for politics. The alien environment is usually a representation of some problem taken to the extreme....

Sandworms be like: Are we a joke to you?

Here to say this.

I immediately thought of this too.

Personally, I think it takes a really *good* author to come up with aliens that aren't just us in disguise (one particular trope or characteristic exaggerated to make them seem so 'alien') or just ravening monsters. I'd rather skip the trope/cliche alien for 'just humans' if they can at least write that well.

I figure you need cooperation in order to advance your tech enough to build starships, you need packbonding in order to cooperate, and packbonding only works if the boundaries are liberal. (Hence humans packbonding with dogs.) So anything that could make it to space could probably be friends with us, unless it was artificially engineered and took tech from its creators.

Yes and no. Imagine us in space at the height of the cold war. Paranoid, hair-triggered, deeply xenophobic. I can imagine some other race of beings doing the 'space race' like we did, except for the sole purpose of dropping a rock on their enemy from orbit.

I like to think we could be friends/allies with aliens we meet, but I think it'll be a lot of work if it ever happens.

Fair enough. I just don’t like all that “Dark Forest” stuff.

(This rant has been cut for excessive detail.)

i literally have never read one, either sci-fi or fantasy, where there's only humans, but i'm guessing you mean other non-humans characters.

There’s a story called Coelecanths where every creature in an entire ecosystem is descended from humans. Including the bacteria. It’s weird and I don’t really get it.

Is that the one where some assholes trap a spaceship full of humans on a snowball in a red dwarfs system?

I dunno. The main thing I remember is that some guy ejaculates on a stage while proclaiming how great humanity is, and it turns out he’s somehow trapped there and has no idea if anyone is watching.

to be fair, you are technically meeting creatures other than humans although i don't think ill be reading that book.

Firefly?

I've actually never seen it. It doesn't have any animals at all? wow lol.

It doesn't have any aliens, who said animals??

(no subject)

meadowphoenix - 2023-12-20 04:40 (UTC) - Expand

It's been forever since I've seen it, but I'm pretty sure there's only earth animals. Humans terraformed the planets in the system and brought in life forms.

meadowphoenix - 2023-12-20 04:57 (UTC) - Expand

(Anonymous) - 2023-12-20 06:45 (UTC) - Expand

(Anonymous) - 2023-12-20 12:47 (UTC) - Expand

meadowphoenix - 2023-12-20 14:24 (UTC) - Expand

(Anonymous) - 2023-12-20 14:51 (UTC) - Expand

Red Dwarf!

The Martian.

I think you've just made me realize that i both do and don't consider that sci-fi (like it's obviously sci-fi because we're not at the humans to mars stage yet, but it reads more like a regular drama that just happens to be in space to me which goes against my conception of sci-fi lol), but you're right it's a human only thing.

(Anonymous) - 2023-12-20 04:20 (UTC) - Expand

meadowphoenix - 2023-12-20 05:22 (UTC) - Expand

Hmmmmm. I don't think there's any aliens in Dune? That's the first one that springs to mind.

I've read some like Gateway by Fred Pohl, where (at least in the first book which is the only one I've read) there ARE aliens but they're long-dead and the human characters are just trying to scavenge the technological remnants they've left behind. IIRC the Jack McDevitt Hutch books are similar - alien life does exist but it's all died out and humans are basically doing archaeology trying to figure out what it was like. They're very good books, too, from what I remember.

It's also fairly common in time travel and alternate dimension books - for instance, there's no aliens in The Chronoliths by Robert Charles Wilson. And there's some where characters seem to be aliens but are actually humans from alternate dimensions, like [redacted because it's a spoiler] by [redacted bald author].

the sandworms are aliens, they just aren't characters.

but those recs sound cool, thanks!

(Anonymous) - 2023-12-20 13:20 (UTC) - Expand

Agree with this so much. This is the reason why I like DS9 more than most Star Trek series, purely for having more main aliens in the storylines.