Conference noted::sf

    	I think the most unique alien ever written in SF was Stanislaw
    Lem's SOLARIS, the ocean/being which encompassed the planet of the
    same name.                                   
    
    	Solaris was so unusual to the scientists in that book, it took
    years for them to realize that Solaris was a living being, then
    many more years to realize it was intelligent.  The only other things
    known about Solaris was that it was controlling the rate and distance
    of the planet's orbit around its sun, and that was trying to
    communicate/understand with the humans it encountered in two ways:
    By making images from the human minds, both as separate entities
    on its own massive body, and from dreams as living beings the
    scientists once knew.  All else was speculation.
    
    	Solaris also definetely qualified as an alien with which to
    reflect humans and our society upon.
    
    	Larry
    

    For originality, Id say Jack Chalker's Warden Diamond series is
    up there.   Those little micro-orgs, and their effect on humans
    is fascinating, and described in believable detail too.  The variety
    of life on the four worlds is well thought out too.  And the uncovering
    of the last alien life form was spectacular.
    
    For a variety of aliens who fit the 'mixture of Earth type animals'
    the Well of Souls series has no equal.  There's just too many to
    rattle off.  Anybody care to try (without the book of course)
    
    /Dan
    

    re .1
    
    	I never read Solaris (yet), but your description reminds me
    of John Varley's Titan.  Now there is a unique alien.
    /Dan

    	SOLARIS was published in 1960, so if anything, Varley may have
    gotten his idea from Lem, not the other way around (note that I
    am NOT saying he definetely DID).
    
    	Larry
    

re: .1

The point of Solaris was that the ocean-being was beyond human 
comprehension.   It was obviously enormously powerful and enormously 
intelligent, but the scientists in the story never did succeed in 
communicating with it, even after centuries of trying.  This is 
actually another good function of aliens: to show that there might be 
sentient beings that are so different from us that no contact is possible.
They could differ not just in physical form, but in mental form.  Our 
world-views just don't have any intersections.

Most writers don't go to this extreme, of course, because you can't 
write much of a story around it.  They stop with partial overlap of 
human and alien world-views, and then explore contrasts.  This is a 
particular specialty of C. J. Cherryh's.  She is constantly dumping 
some poor beknighted human in the midst of a culture with 
fundamentally different values, and then letting him (and us) figure 
it out.  

/jlr

    
    Re: Solaris
    
        FYI, there was also a film produced which was based on
    the book Solaris. I saw it about ten years ago - it's in
    Russian with English subtitles. The film was very confusing,
    because the nature of Solaris wasn't revealed until the very
    end, and even then it wasn't clear that there was one being
    causing all the trouble.  Most of the film showed the planet's
    visiting scientists having visions and hallucinations about
    people that they had known, without knowing the origin of
    the visions.
    
                              

    	In the novel, Solaris took memories of certain people from the
    minds of the scientists living/working at the Earth base located
    on its planet while they slept.  These memories were detailed
    individuals almost down to the molecular level.  
    
    	Why Solaris did this, it is never clearly found out, but the
    theory was that it was an attempt at communication/understanding
    by Solaris.
                                                     
    	Larry
    

    Did Lem ever discuss how Solaris guided the orbit of its planet?
    For example, did this animated ocean regulate its own tides and
    thus play tricks with angular momentum?  Or was it just global-
    scale telekinesis?
    
    Earl Wajenberg

    	I think it was an incredible telekinetic power - Solaris and
    the planet were almost one, anyway - but like most aspects about
    Solaris, it was just a theory.
    
    	Larry
    

    re the film:
    
    It was extremely boring as well, I had a very hard time keeping
    my eyes open during it, and only succeeded for about half the movie.
                                                   
                  /
                 (  ___
                  ) ///
                 /
    

    Re Solaris, et al.:
    
    I recall reading a short story in the mid 1950s (probably by Leinster,
    but I could be in error here) about a planetary intelligence formed
    out of what started out as the hydrosphere.  Can't recall the title,
    but it apparently antedated the ones currently being discussed.
    
    Re .0:
    
    The "mixed bag" aliens of the James White school really were brought
    to light in the Doc Smith Lensman stories.  They ranged from the
    humanoid types like the Chickladorians all the way to the
    quasi-fourth-dimensional [?] Palanians.  These are more credible,
    because different environments breed different needs.
    
    With respect to the Lovecraftian critters, those are borderland
    sf/fantasy anyway.  It's not so much that they are boogies as that
    they are so _alien_ that points of contact are difficult to maintain
    (what does a Lovecraftian "god" care about human problems?  It acts
    in its own [incomprehensible] interests).
    
    Two more worth mentioning:
    
    The protean ones -- like the BEM in Campbell's "Who Goes There?"
    Shape-changing can be a good survival tool in certain circumstances,
    and add intelligence ...  
    
    The symbiotic ones -- like the Hunter in Hal Clement's _Needle_.
    Don't know how they'd get the intelligence, but they're an interesting
    concept. ...
    
    Oh, and yes --  There's the "nebular cloud" type like Fred Hoyle's
    Black Cloud.
    
    Steve Kallis, Jr.
    

    _The_Starchild_Trilogy_ by Pohl & Williamson was a veritable catalog
    of strange creatures. Most were air breathers living out in the
    Oort Cloud. Some had rocket propulsion, some had inertialess drives.
    
    But the strangest was the plasma life form, ie intelligent stars.
                                                   
                  /
                 (  ___
                  ) ///
                 /
    

"Star Maker" by Olaf Stapledon also had intelligent stars, and it was 
written in the thirties.  It takes the planetary intelligences a long 
time to realize what they were orbiting, because the time scales 
were so different.  Since a star's lifetime is roughly ten billion years,
a second to it would be about five years to us.

Stapledon even had intelligent galaxies, but these never evolved very far.
Their time scales were so long that the universe started winding down before
they achieved sentience.

By the end of the book, pretty much the entire universe is a single 
sentient organism.  Heat-death is approaching, though, so it devotes 
all its energies to meeting the Star Maker.  The final vision is of a 
sequence of universes, growing steadily grander and more complex, until
ones are reached where our universe would be just an atom.  Only then 
does the Star Maker merge with his creations.  An old book, but
unsurpassed in sense of the cosmic.

/jlr

    "Star Maker" is really a cosmic history book more than a novel.
     It is narrated in the first person, but the identity of "I" keeps
    changing as the originally human narrator gets absorbed into ever-
    more-inclusive super-minds.  Not great drama, but an almost chemically
    pure example of science fiction as a "literature of ideas."
    
    "Star Maker" is also a storehouse (or maybe the origin) for a great
    many SF ideas.  One of them is the hive-mind.  Stapledon describes
    several versions of this, culminating in the cosmic awareness. 
    But much earlier we see intelligences whose bodies are flocks of
    small bird-like creatures, linked by organic radio.
    
    This theme is used by Clarke, on a cosmic scale in "Childhood's
    End," and on a merely galactic scale in his "Rescue Mission," in
    which a ship from the Galactic Federation comes zipping into the
    solar system just before the Sun goes nova, looking for some remnants
    of the intelligent species they just now realized was living here.
    The Federation ship has a multi-species crew and one of the species
    is the race-mind Palador; all Paladorians are part of the same
    individual and two units of it are on this ship.  This time the
    connecting medium is telepathy, since radio would hardly serve to 
    link those two up with the main population light-years distant.
    
    James Blish pictures most of the galaxy as inhabited by race-minds
    in a novelette, the title of which escapes me.  James White has
    an occasional hive-mind in a walk-on (swarm-on?) roll in his "Sector
    General" stories.  In "Serpent's Reach," C. J. Cherryh describes
    an intelligent but very alien species that live like Terran hive
    insects.  (Rather unimaginatively and implausibly, they also look
    like Terran hive insects, only horse-sized.)  They are linked
    pheromonally and one is never quite sure if one is dealing with
    a hive-mind or just a very strange alien social psychology, or if
    there is a difference between those two.
    
    Earl Wajenberg

    In the "Sector General" stories of James White, the people use a
    cataloging system to describe the wild variety of aliens.  Every
    creature gets a four-letter code, which is supposed to describe
    it in some detail.  (White only describes the significance of the
    first letter in detail.)  For instance, humans and very humanoid
    aliens are classification DBDG, while insectile creatures may be
    classed GKLO or some such.
    
    In the "Lensman" series by E. E. Smith, races were sometimes rated
    (by Earthmen) on their degree of humanoidy.  The scale appeared
    to run from zero to one.  A highly humanoid race was described as
    "human to nine decimal places," i.e. 0.999999999 on the scale. 
    At some known point on the scale, alien races became humanoid enough
    to interbreed with Earth humans.
    
    Anyone know of any other taxonomies for aliens?  Does anyone think
    such systems at all plausible or likely to be useful?
    
    Earl Wajenberg

    I dont think it would work too well.
    
    Taxonomy works because all life on this planet is assumed to descend
    from common ancestors.  Aliens would be on a whole new tree, and
    the best you could hope for is functional convergence, for I think
    the odds against genetic compatability would be larger than Issac
    Asimov's vocabulary. :^)
    
    /Dan

    Modern taxonomy depends heavily on evolutionary descent, but there
    was an elaborate and, on the whole, successful science of taxonomy
    before Darwin.
    
    For a start, I could easily imagine that life everywhere falls into
    a few basic metabolic groups, e.g.:
    
    	Carbon-polymer forms
    		Oxygen-breathing, water-based
    			Left-handed amines, Left-handed sugars
    			Left-handed amines, Right-handed sugars
    			Right-handed amines, Left-handed sugars
    			Right-handed amines, Right-handed sugars
    		Oxygen-breathing, ammonia-based
    			[repeat amine/sugar list]
    		Hydrogen-breathing, water-based
    			[repeat amine/sugar list]
    		Hydrogen-breathing, ammonia-based
    			[repeat amine/sugar list]
    
    And then there might be similar schemes for, say, creatures based
    on the action of liquid helium in ultra-cold environments.
    
    A taxonomy could work as long as the objects in it fall into fairly
    natural categories of some kind.
    
    Earl Wajenberg

    Your system implies that their is more similarity between
    two races with RHS/RHA then between one of them and a third
    species with RHS/LHA.  I dont know that I agree.  I believe that
    it is most likely that every single world (or other ecological 
    closed system) would have only one form of the iterations you
    mentioned, and that the choice would most likely be random.
    
    Therefore, why group worlds together on the basis of this random
    event?  I suppose it does imply more chance of genetic compatibility,
    but would warmblooded, milk producing bipeds be more removed from
    us because of different sugar and amine orientation than thirty-foot
    long slugs with cilia where its stalks should be, and our amine,sugar
    orientation?  
    
    I think once you open the classification to new evolutionary lines,
    you ought to start a new tree for each, and horizontal lines to
    denote parallel evolution perhaps.  
    
    /Dan

    I chose biochemical features because:
    
    1) There are fewer possibilities than with, say, anatomy, so a coherent
       classification actually has some chance of developing.
    
    2) It actually is significant for interactions between races.
    
    Regarding (1), if there are only a few well-defined possibilities
    for a design, then it should always be possible to make up a taxonomic
    system based on that design.  If the few, well-defined features
    imply a wide variety of other features, the taxonomy starts becoming
    useful.  For instance, I think it likely that the bulk of intelligent
    races will be omnivores, with minorities of carnivores and herbivores.
    The carnivores and herbivores will probably have strong social and
    psychological tendencies related to their ecology.  So knowing a
    race's place in the food chain would be very useful.
    
    Regarding (2), creatures with the same handedness of sugars and
    amines WILL have more in common with us than creatures that differ.
    Not in anatomy or psychology, no.  But they are likelier to be able
    to colonize the same worlds as us, be able to eat the same foods
    as us, possibly catch the same diseases as us.
    
    Earl Wajenberg

    Re Doc Smoth's _Lensman_ aliens:
    
    The actual catagorization was alphabetic, but was 4-place only for
    gross appearance (in _Children of the Lens_, Christopher Kinnison
    got an ultra-high burst of thought from an expiring Plooran and
    was able to reconstruct it to four places: RTSL.  As I recall, that
    was the autumn form of a Plooran).
    
    The "decimal places" was techno-slang, chiefly used by Kimball Kinnison
    and cohorts, as in "That checks out to a dozen decimal places."
    
    Steve Kallis, Jr.
    

Re 26.19

K. Sherman, the author of 26.19, dislikes the movie "ET" on the basis that
"you don't get to rise to intelligence -- let alone high tech -- unless as
 part of your evolutionary process, you become the meanest mother on the
 planet. Smiling shmooes would have been all gobbled-up by a meaner competitor
 long before technology developed."

While I, too, think "ET" was over-hyped and had some flaws, I don't think poor 
evolutionary theory was one of them.  For a start, the movie does not tell us 
if ET's quiet and retiring nature is the result of his species's instincts or 
their culture, or even whether it is typical of them, or even if it is typical 
of ET when he is not marooned on a planetful of barbarians.

But I am more concerned with the evolutionary theory implied.  I don't think 
that being the "meanest mother on the planet" is a necessary prerequsite for
evolving intelligence and hi-tech.  First of all, I don't think humans are the 
"meanest" species on Earth, if by that you mean having the highest innate 
aggression.  Look at weasels, or Pekinese dogs, or maybe even chimps.

If by "meanest" you mean able and occasionally willing to wreak disaster, that 
is not a prerequisite of hi-tech, but simply hi-tech itself, being used in a 
particular way.  Most of the disaster we wreak on other species using our
hi-tech is done in completely cold blood, without bad temper, though perhaps 
short-sightedly.

Of course, our ancestors did better at surviving than other, closely-related 
species of hominids.  But last I heard it wasn't clear that we drove them into 
extinction by competion; it may simply be that other factors polished them 
off, but not us.  Even if we did compete them into extinction, we didn't 
necessarily do it by waging war on them; we might simply have been better at 
hunting and gathering and migrating than they, due to better posture, higher 
intelligence, better family ties, or other things not directly related to 
aggression.

Earl Wajenberg

  Also check out Hogan's "Gentle Giants of Ganymede" and "Inherit The Stars."
  In Hogan's universe, the giants in question evolved on a world without
  predators.

  JP

>  Also check out Hogan's "Gentle Giants of Ganymede" and "Inherit The Stars."
>  In Hogan's universe, the giants in question evolved on a world without
>  predators.

That bothered me when I read those books.  I find it hard to believe that
animal life could evolve and not turn out some number of carnivores.
(I believe that the reference in Hogan is to carnivores, not merely
predators.)
Without carnivores, there would be no carrion eaters, and without
carrion eaters, there would be have quite a pile of dead animals waiting for 
the fungi and bacteria to finish them off.  That's an awfully large ecological
niche standing empty and available.  Once there are carrion eaters,
then it's a small step to having one carrion eater start to eat the 
disabled-but-not-quite-dead, and then competitive advantage leads 
on to predation.  (Remember the buzzard poster:  "Patience hell, I'm gonna
go kill something.")
This yields greater advantage to intelligence.  Predators need to be smart
to catch food smart enough to run away, and prey needs to be smart to 
avoid capture.  So predation does encourage intelligence, and not just
for the predator.  I think Hogan acknowledges the low-pressure, slow-growth
mode in references to how long it took the Gentle Giants to reach their apex.

Until altruism is universal, either by instinct or intellectual adoption,
self-interest will be the prime criterion to survival.  Even then,
competition among groups each altruistic within themselves will lead to
fights to the death.  Thus I believe that the dominant life forces
will be the meanest sons of whatever in their ecospheres, where "meanest"
means willing to go to the wall, but not necessarily doing so wantonly 
or without reason.

- tom]

    But almost any animal will "go to the wall" (fight desparately and
    without restraint) against the right foe.  So that isn't much of
    a hallmark of the most advanced lifeforms.
    
    It may be that some animals never exhibit win-or-die-trying
    aggression, but if any do, I suspect it is the big social carnivores 
    at the top of the food chain, e.g. lions and wolves.  These animals 
    have no natural predators and built-in inhibitions about killing each 
    other in combat; thus they may not be prepared to fight to the death.  
    (I could be wrong; maybe they DO sometimes fight to the death.)
    
    This suggests that, among intelligent lifeforms generally, most
    of them can exhibit die-trying determination when they deem it
    necessary.  If any cannot, it will most likely be the ones who LOOK
    like the meanest ones around, creatures like Poul Anderson's Adzel,
    all armor and teeth on the outside, who may find it expedient to
    be much more accomodating on the inside.
    
    Earl Wajenberg

    RE .24
    
    	Hogan's series did have carnivores; however, their effectiveness
    decreased over time as a result of the giants developing a posionous
    system.

    After reading some of the replies in hear, I'm wondering if someone
    should start a xeno-anthropology or xeno-sapientology topic.  A
    discussion of intelligent life-forms. Xenobiology implies talking about
    any form of extraterrestrial life from one-celled bacteria to
    multi-celled organisms and doesnt always imply sentience.