TJS
Legendary Pubber
- Joined
- May 5, 2018
- Messages
- 3,668
- Reaction score
- 9,027
As someone who really doesn't like furries in science fiction I want to speak to this. Because I think you're essentially correct. Parallel evolution is real and it's probably, on balance of probability likely that we would discover aliens that look like something we would recognise (the so called bumpy fore-headed humanoids) than twelve limbed llizardlike creatures with something that resembles butterfly wings and two brains.My initial impulse was that people were reacting to furry kink stuff but I think I'm wrong. I've got me a THESIS type thingie! So, in the sixties, science fiction was trying very hard to become a respectable adult genre with a bit more sex and less violence and more science and this is the period that gives us our ideas on "hard" science fiction. And there in lies the issue, especially when it comes to Traveller. In our culture, anthropomorphized animals are identified with children's books and visual media. The real impulse behind disliking furry aliens is that they are seen as childish. There are plenty of good reasons to use animal people and plenty of good reasons not to but there is a lurking fear of being seen as childish that also reflects on furry fandom as they are adults dressing up and pretending to be animal people.
As I noted before, the only life forms we have any actual evidence of are terrestrial ones so it is very reasonable to base aliens on them from a "hard science" point of view. Genetic modification could be motivated by a wide range of desires but even sexual fetishes point to a desire to create a recognizable under class of non-humans for any number of reasons that would also include expendable canon fodder, compliant workers, alternate social structures, specialized capabilities like a dog's sense of smell, or even better medical test subjects (in my own setting rats become sentient as a result of lab tinkering, their terrorist organization is called NIHM.) With surgery and biological constructs, animal traits might become fashionable, with cat ears and tails being purchased at the local tattoo and piercing joint. These might even have cultural significance or be tied to specific social roles, the police might all wear dog's heads and the judges rams, plaintiffs weasels, and priests bulls. An interesting notion for a baroque setting.
One other thing you often see is a backlash against digigrade feet as ridiculous or less functional and yet we've seen a number of walking robots use a very similar system in recent years.
But...I think getting across that sense of the alien is important. It's like when you read history. You can read a lot of history and think "oh it's people being people so familar". For example you read about 6th century Constantinople and you see that the primary thing that people were concerned about was whether the blues chariot team is better than the greens chariot team, and you think "I know that - I know people like that", but then you read further and findout that the other main topic of conversation amongst everyday people was whether the father and the son were of one substance or two - and that this was a crucial concern of everyday life and not just some esoteric academic concern. Or you read that people thought it was a great idea to find a pillar and climb it and then live on top of it for thirty years. History is that combination of the strikingly familiar and the unthinkably alien.
And I like science fiction to address that too. If that's what history is like then that's what the future will be like when viewed from the perspective of the present- and it doesn't feel like a future at all to me unless it conveys some sense of that.
Dog people and cat people are just too familiar to me to feel right. Now if as alien species you were to flip their personalities - so that cat people have doglike behaviour and dog people act like cats because evolution on their worlds has been similar but not quite the same, then we're getting there.
Similarly uplifted dogs. I don't necessarily object to the concept - but I'd want that to be something distinctly uncanny.