Joseph DeMartino
Moderator
<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, arial">quote:</font><HR>...and I've even enjoyed quite a few of the classics of the SF literature that were told from an entirely alien POV, perhaps w/o even a single human in the mix.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>
And I'll bet the "aliens" in every one of those stories acted in an essentially Human manner, from Human motivations like love, fear or greed, despite an overlay of "sense of wonder" SF strangeness. Just as Star Wars was about Humans, despite being set "A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away." (Which I'm pretty sure was part of the original ad campaign.)
Similarly, fairy tales set "once upon a time" may feature elves and giants, but no Humans (so-called) and still be essentially "Human" stories. Does anyone honestly believe that Watership Down is about rabbits, or (puke) Jonathan Livingstone Seagull was about a bird? Even the classic Bradbury story, "There Will Come Soft Rains", about an empty, automated house gradually falling apart, is a narrative of the cycle of life, even though not a single "living" being appears in the story.
All stories are about Humans because the only story-tellers and audiences we know of are Humans. We're all we've got, and we have only our own brains and perceptions to work from in creating fiction, and only our own knowledge and experience to use in identifying with characters. It is precisely when writers try to stray too far from this truth that their stories become unreadable (assuming they make it into print or onto the screen at all.)
That's why we saw so little of the Vorlons and the Shadows. If you keep them mostly out of sight, you can plauisbly make them really alien. But if you try to make them the focus of a story you have to make them too Human in order to do it, robbing them of the very mystery that makes them worth writing about in the first place.
Jeanne Cavelos comes close to doing this without quite falling over the edge in her B5 novels - in part because Kosh is expressly presented as a Vorlon more in touch with the younger races, but because of that, an exception. (Which is why we'll never see a novel or TV movie about the early struggles of the Vorlons and the Shadows.)
BTW, the problem with the phrase "the exception that proves the rule" is that it is an old one that uses a word in a sense that it no longer carries. On the face of it, the phrase makes no sense. Obviously an exception to a rule cannot "prove" it in the sense of "demonstrating that it is true."
But "prove" and "proof" have (or had) another meaning - "to test" (vestigially present in words like "fire-proof" - that is, something tested to make sure that it can withstand fire or resist burning.)
An exception tests the rule - that is, calls into question whether or not the rule is valid. The same usage is found in "The proof of the pudding is in the eating." Since pudding (unlike an equation) is not something typically "proven", this clearly means "the test of whether or not the pudding is good is in the eating". "Oven-proof" and "foolproof" are other examples of the same usage, though in my experience you can never test anything so thoroughly that a real fool can't find a way to screw it up anyway.
Regards,
Joe
------------------
Joseph DeMartino
Sigh Corps
Pat Tallman Division
joseph-demartino@att.net
And I'll bet the "aliens" in every one of those stories acted in an essentially Human manner, from Human motivations like love, fear or greed, despite an overlay of "sense of wonder" SF strangeness. Just as Star Wars was about Humans, despite being set "A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away." (Which I'm pretty sure was part of the original ad campaign.)
Similarly, fairy tales set "once upon a time" may feature elves and giants, but no Humans (so-called) and still be essentially "Human" stories. Does anyone honestly believe that Watership Down is about rabbits, or (puke) Jonathan Livingstone Seagull was about a bird? Even the classic Bradbury story, "There Will Come Soft Rains", about an empty, automated house gradually falling apart, is a narrative of the cycle of life, even though not a single "living" being appears in the story.
All stories are about Humans because the only story-tellers and audiences we know of are Humans. We're all we've got, and we have only our own brains and perceptions to work from in creating fiction, and only our own knowledge and experience to use in identifying with characters. It is precisely when writers try to stray too far from this truth that their stories become unreadable (assuming they make it into print or onto the screen at all.)
That's why we saw so little of the Vorlons and the Shadows. If you keep them mostly out of sight, you can plauisbly make them really alien. But if you try to make them the focus of a story you have to make them too Human in order to do it, robbing them of the very mystery that makes them worth writing about in the first place.
Jeanne Cavelos comes close to doing this without quite falling over the edge in her B5 novels - in part because Kosh is expressly presented as a Vorlon more in touch with the younger races, but because of that, an exception. (Which is why we'll never see a novel or TV movie about the early struggles of the Vorlons and the Shadows.)
BTW, the problem with the phrase "the exception that proves the rule" is that it is an old one that uses a word in a sense that it no longer carries. On the face of it, the phrase makes no sense. Obviously an exception to a rule cannot "prove" it in the sense of "demonstrating that it is true."
But "prove" and "proof" have (or had) another meaning - "to test" (vestigially present in words like "fire-proof" - that is, something tested to make sure that it can withstand fire or resist burning.)
An exception tests the rule - that is, calls into question whether or not the rule is valid. The same usage is found in "The proof of the pudding is in the eating." Since pudding (unlike an equation) is not something typically "proven", this clearly means "the test of whether or not the pudding is good is in the eating". "Oven-proof" and "foolproof" are other examples of the same usage, though in my experience you can never test anything so thoroughly that a real fool can't find a way to screw it up anyway.
Regards,
Joe
------------------
Joseph DeMartino
Sigh Corps
Pat Tallman Division
joseph-demartino@att.net
