Have you ever wondered why book, movie, and TV depictions of aliens are almost always human or human-like?
I have. And I wonder, if there are alien life forms, what makes us think they’d be like us?
My guess is that we find it very difficult to imagine life outside of what we can perceive. For as imaginative as we are, ultimately we are limited by who we are and what we can observe.
Dogs are very intelligent creatures. They can problem solve. Yet they can only problem solve based on what they can physically accomplish. The same goes for dolphins, pigs, crows, and primates.
Our opposable thumbs and ability to create tools puts us at the top of the food chain. But our physical form ultimately limits our ability to problem solve as well as measure the world and universe.
Have you ever thought what it would be like to see gamma rays? Or hear radio waves? We have no idea what that would be like. We can make guesses perhaps, but that’s all it would be: a guess.
We have no concept of being outside of who we are. We can only guess, and probably not very well at that.
HP Lovecraft thought it unlikely that other life forms, should they exist, would be like us. So he set out to create a truly alien entity. The result was the story “The Colour Out of Space.” Which I think is the finest story Lovecraft ever penned. Lovecraft himself said it was his personal favorite among his short stories.
In the story, a meteorite falls to earth and lands on the farm of one Nahum Gardner. When scientists attempt to take a sample of the meteorite, a globule is revealed that radiates a strange indescribable color. The globule is apparently the alien or contains the alien.
In describing the extraterrestrial being, Lovecraft doesn’t. He only says that it is by analogy that it can be called a color at all that radiates from the thing because the light fell outside of anything known in the visible spectrum.
This is Lovecraft’s genius at work. For in only describing the alien as an indescribable color, we can’t know what it is.
What HPL does is describes the effect of the alien on Gardner’s farm and family. And since “Colour” is a horror story, none of it is good.
The farm’s produce, while exceedingly beautiful, is inedible. Vegetation becomes gray and brittle. The animals sicken and die. The Gardner family becomes sick, goes insane, turns into hideous monsters, and then dies.
Because we don’t know what the alien is, we don’t know how to stop it. We don’t know if it’s a sentient being or some type of space virus. We don’t know if it’s malevolent, or simply doing its thing. You know, like eating.
What we do know is that we have no idea what it is and that its presence is destructive to life on this planet.
That, my friends, is the ultimate nightmare.
“The Colour Out of Space” is in the public domain and freely available on the Internet. Do yourself a favor and read it. Then think about our attempts to find alien life. Perhaps that’s not such a good idea.
Until next time, happy reading!
Threads that Bind 
6 responses to “Completely Different Than Anything We Can Imagine”
Interesting, as always! In the case of visual productions, the simple answer is that, unless it’s The Blob or The Monolith Monsters, a human actor has to put on the rubber suit and portray the alien. The original Star Trek, up against crippling budgetary constraints, did away with the rubber suits entirely, resorting instead to unusual hair and makeup, exotic clothes, and a few bits of odd jewelry to create their aliens. Later, with more money, they started gluing bony plates to everyone’s faces, but yeah, they still have to be played by humans.
Literature offers far less excuses, as all it takes to create anything is the wave of a keyboard, and yet… I’m trying to think of examples from my own work, and aside from the winged snake in Serpens Alatus and the predatory, uh, membranes from Membranes, all of my monsters have two arms, two legs, and a head with centralized sensory organs. Guilty as charged, I guess.
You challenge us all as writers to rise to the call. I’ve done a shift away from horror for a time, but it’s a very firm second, and when I return to it, I plan to read this article again before I begin story construction. I can do better, and thanks to your insights, renewed efforts will be made…
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But even your winged serpent is comprehensible. Lovecraft was saying that aliens are likely not to be comprehensible at all. Which is what gives his story such power. The horror lies in our inability to understand at all what is destroying us.
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Jack does a great job of handling why movies and TV shows were compelled to use “humanoid” aliens. And, for better or for worse, many contemporary writers are inspired by movies and TV. That said, Lovecraft wasn’t the only author who worked to create very non-humanoid aliens. Other examples that come immediately to mind are H.G. Wells with his tentacled, beaked, large-eyed, big-brained Martians, Larry Niven with his two-headed, cowardly puppeteers, and Stanley Weinbaum’s Tweel from A Martian Odyssey, who are quite alien, almost looking like tall, plucked flamingoes. So there are examples out there and I know I’m only just scratching the surface.
I’ve always endeavored to make my aliens quite different and non-humanoid, even to the extent that most can’t generally coexist in the same atmosphere as we do. I do have one notable exception, but in-universe, it’s considered a weird coincidence.
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Lovecraft’s point was that all aliens in fiction are comprehensible, whether humanoid or not. He posited that aliens, should they exist, would probably not be capable of being comprehended by us. Hence, his “colour”. It is completely incomprehensible to the point where it can’t even be described. “Colour” being the closest we can come to a description.
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Good points, CW. Why indeed would we automatically assume we could even comprehend a truly alien life form? And I agree that Lovecraft’s story was excellently done (and even lacking solid descriptions, still creepy as hell). Another interesting story with an incomprehensible alien (with which we don’t even have a clue as to how to communicate) is “Solaris” by Stanislaw Lem.
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I’ll have to check out that story by Lem. Thanks!
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