It's also easier for human scriptwriters to imagine themselves repressing an emotion, pushing it back, crushing it down, then it is for them to imagine once deleting an emotion and it never coming back. The former is a mode that human minds can operate in; the latter would take neurosurgery.
Seems like this is a reasonable place to ask if people have recommendations for good scifi with truly alien-feeling aliens. I was trying to figure out if the cylons in season one of BSG counted, since I have trouble modelling their goals and acceptable means, but (a) part of this is that we just didn't see that much of them and (b) "I have trouble modelling them" would suggest that crazy people are the least human since their behavior is a lot more noisy. I don't think that's the metric I'm going for.
John Ringo's 'Legacy of the Aldenata'. It deliberately embraces the alienness, even to the point that the characters anthropomorphize the alien motives, make predictions based on those motives, and are sometimes wrong. In other words, the aliens appear to have behaviors which are explained by human reasoning, and the human characters describe them in terms of human characteristics, but modeling them as being like humans who would have taken their prior actions is wrong.
They are still humanlike enough to communicate, because that is a prerequisite to being known to be radically different: An alien that cannot communicate with me either resembles an animal that cannot communicate with me or a rock.
Legacy of the Aldenata is really JR's best series. It wavered for a bit around Cally's War, but picked up with Honor of the Clan. I find the conservative politics a bit heavy-handed in most of his books, but it's not so bad in LotA.
C.J. Cherryh's Foreigner series may fit the bill. One of the central premises is that the aliens in question have no feeling of love, but do have a sort of really important instinct of loyalty.
The short story "Story of Your Life" by Ted Chiang involves some aliens whose subjective experience is very different from ours.
Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow has aliens who are roughly humanoid (two arms and two legs, etc.) but who inhabit a very different moral landscape. (In this sense it has something in common with Three Worlds Collide.)
Ooh, I've had that recommended to me once already this summer, and your more specific recommendation has pushed it onto my requested library holds list.
Strangely enough, I thought Spielberg did a pretty good job of portraying alienness in AI. A weird and inhuman beta version of a little boy.
Interestingly enough nearly all attempts I've seen at "alien" aliens end up portraying them as virtue ethicists with weird virtues.
Heck most portrayals of consequentialists or deontologists (or most people attempting to live those philosophies) end up being virtue ethicists attempting to approximate consequentialism/deontology by suitable choice of virtues (and looking like straw consequentialists/deontologists to someone using a better approximation).
Today's post, Points of Departure was originally published on 09 September 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
Hollywood seems to model "emotionless" AI's as humans with some slight differences. For the most part, they act as emotionally repressed humans, despite the fact that this is a very unlikely way for AI's to behave.
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