And also a pony. An alien pony.

[mrissa]

So I'm going to tell you a thing I want, and you will either tell me where I can find more of it or why I can't find more of it.

What I want is a fairly classic mode of science fiction that I call "planets and aliens." It's mostly about the people on one planet, although there may be more, and they're learning to deal with the aliens on that planet, although again there may be more. It isn't about wars in FTL spaceships, although there may be FTL spaceships (or there may not, there may just be FTL communications, or not even that). And I can come up with all sorts of classic examples and very few new recent things. (C.J. Cherryh's atevi books, for example, fit the bill, but she started writing them so long ago. There's a lot of LeGuin in this mode.)

So why the fewer recent things? Did people become stymied for things to say after they realized that using aliens as code for particular racial/ethnic groups here was a bad idea? Someone I was talking to suggested that it was because modern physics made long-distance space travel look less plausible than once it did, but there are so very many implausible things that are written about in great detail that this seems like not the explanation to me. Did everything just get pulled over into the Military SF realm and have the aliens mostly sucked out? What's the deal here?

Comments

[rosefox]

The only recent thing I can think of that even comes close is Zoe's Tale, and Vernor Vinge's forthcoming The Children of the Sky. Felix Gilman's The Half-Made World owes a fair amount to that mode of storytelling but is also very different.

Did people become stymied for things to say after they realized that using aliens as code for particular racial/ethnic groups here was a bad idea?

Yeah, I think awareness of the downsides of colonialism happened.

In addition, I don't think many people these days think it would be awesome to be a colonist. Mostly it sounds like a lot of work.

[wshaffer.livejournal.com]

I think that in addition to the factors you named, the resurgence of space opera (which shares some features with "planets and aliens" but isn't doing quite the same thing) might have stolen some of the energy that used to go into "planets and aliens" stories.

I'm rather fond of "planets and aliens" stories myself, so I'm kind of hoping other people will come up with recent examples that I don't know about.

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

Two books about froggie aliens: My UNDERTOW and Amy Thomson's THE COLOR OF DISTANCE.

There's Robert Charles Wilson's BIOS. No sentient aliens, but a nifty dangerous biosphere.

There's Scalzi's Fuzzy reboot, though (don't look, John) I'd recommend the Piper version if you haven't read it.

[marydell.livejournal.com]

[edited because I put the other comment in the wrong spot. What I meant to say here was:]

Seconding the rec of BIOS; it's one of my favorite planetary-exploration books. I thought the diggers might be sentient because they [rot-13]pbbcrengviryl yherq gung bar qhqr vagb enatr fb gurl pbhyq rng uvz. (IIRC) But there's probably a bug on our planet that can do that...

[apis-mellifera.livejournal.com]

What about Embassytown?

[marydell.livejournal.com]

Whoops, I'm re-posting this so it's top-level and not a non-sequitur reply to Bear.

A Woman of the Iron People by Eleanor Aronson has interesting & classic-feeling aliens, although the human anthropologists interacting with them are a bit irritating at times. It's one of those "wander around the planet getting to know each other" stories and it's overall quite good, I think.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

That's what it was: I kept thinking "Carnival! Wait, no, that's not what I mean here." And what I meant was Undertow instead.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

It's also twenty years old. Which doesn't disqualify it from the goodness, by any means, but it isn't very recent.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Haven't read it. It's this sort of thing, then? I was not at all a fan of Mieville's earlier work, but The City and the City was not bad.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Huh. I don't really know what you mean about The Half-Made World in this context. I can very easily see the very different but not so much the debt it owes.

[apis-mellifera.livejournal.com]

There are aliens and colonists and the aliens are really really really ALIEN and the colonists are totally dependent on them because the environment of the planet is pretyt hostile to humans. The book definitely addresses colonialism but also language and meaning and I really loved it--more than The City and the City (which I really liked) and way more than Kraken (which I did not like) and about a million times more than Looking for Jake (which I hated and is the earliest Mieville I've read). It's my favorite Mieville so far. Which may not be saying much because I haven't read his earlier work, but this one was really thinky and brain hurty in a good way.

[rosefox]

I could read it as being set a few hundred years after a planet-and-aliens story. The interactions with the Magical Natives feel very first contact-ish even though obviously first contact was a long time ago.

[rosefox]

Oh yes! That is an excellent suggestion.

[apis-mellifera.livejournal.com]

It's definitely one of my favorite books from this year. Really tackles the colonialism issue head on and in an interesting way.

[coraa.livejournal.com]

I don't know, and I wish I did, because I really like that genre! I like space opera but dislike milSF and have trouble finding things that suit me in general, though, among newer books.

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

OT: Lewis's SPACE TRILOGY isn't recent either, but it's about how the aliens learned to deal with us. (IE, Lewis was being anti-colonialist.)

[timprov.livejournal.com]

I suspect the fact that so many people love to interpret such books as being code for particular ethnic groups, or as statements about colonialism, is very offputting for more people than me. I have three P&A projects that I really haven't terrible interest in taking anywhere in the current critical environment.

Also some of it has become fantasy.

[ashnistrike.livejournal.com]

Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow isn't recent any more either, is it? Damn. I love this subgenre too, but I got nothin'.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't be surprised if the movie Avatar has contributed toward scaring people off that subgenre by being such an outstanding example of 'white guy rides in to save the colorful (literally!) natives'. Though it was extremely lucrative...

[alecaustin.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty sure the decline in Planets & Aliens SF has been going on for over a decade now, actually.

Avatar, for all its faults, is actually a (surprisingly mainstream) example of the sub-genre, which seems to have become uncool/something to avoid as of the late '90s and early '00s. Aside from a handful of works like Karen Traviss's Wess'har books and the stuff people have already mentioned, a thread of the genre that used to be central to SF has more or less been abandoned.

For all that works like Avatar (and in different ways, the likes of Purgatory and The Word for World is Forest) are problematic, it feels like people kept on writing this sort of thing in bulk through the late '80s. Then during the '90s, something happened, the Zeitgeist moved away from aliens, and people mostly stopped.

I, for one, would like to be able to put my finger on why.

[ellarien]

Karen Traviss's series starting with City of Pearl, maybe, though there are several different lots of aliens and several different planets. The author says she doesn't read fiction, so it's not exactly in dialog with the genre, and it's odd in some ways; it certainly doesn't go in for human exceptionalism. That came out between 2004 and 2008, and these days the author seems to be writing video-game tie-ins.

The other thing that fits into that mental category, for me, is Kristine Smith's series starting with Code of Conduct (1999), which wrapped up in 2007. In that case most of the action takes place off the alien planet -- a lot of it on Earth, revolving around the alien embassy.

Oh, and K.D. Wentworth's Black on Black and Stars over Stars, which I got from the Baen Free Library, but those are somewhat older, I think.

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

It's my book that nobody remembers. *g* Poor little book. Just ignore the macro-scale quantum mechanics. At least I'm really nice and know better, and it was too cool not to do. ;-)

[mastadge.livejournal.com]

Huh. I remember really enjoying the first couple City of Pearl novels, but for some reason never finished the series. Maybe it's time to revisit.

[logovore.livejournal.com]

End of the Cold War?

[marydell.livejournal.com]

Why, so it is. This is a problem with doing most of my reading on Kindle--it's certainly possible to look at a publication date, but everything seems equally new at first glance.

That sort of explains the still-apparently-Maoist China that's featured in the book. Sort of.