I wrote once before about whether there are things we shouldn’t write about. My ultimate conclusion was that there isn’t, but we’ve got to be careful how we write. Writing from an incorrect ideology does have real consequences; it aids people in building up an image of the world which is inaccurate. Ultimately, that inaccurate worldview can be used to justify unethical choices.

One of the most famous problematic elements in speculative fiction is the conceit of the intrinsically evil species. In most cases, authors do it thoughtlessly, simply needing a baddie for the worldbuilding and deciding to make it orcs or goblins or something. And this has propagated throughout the genre, to the point that it has become a staple of the standard fantasy world.

Now people defend it like this: orcs aren’t real, they’re not even (necessarily) coded to be like any real-world ethnicity. So you can’t very well be racist against orcs in real life.

The problem, of course, is that in real life there is no such thing as an evil race. But there very much is a real-life problem with people who think there is, or act like there is.

Let’s assume that the orcs aren’t a stand-in for any real life human group. There remains something troubling in the worldbuilding, and that’s bioessentialism. The belief that your biology—your genes or your ancestry or whatever—determines what you are, not just in minor things like the color of your eyes, but in big things like your ethics and how many human rights you deserve.

That’s a thing people believe in real life, often without really thinking about it. It’s also (and this is very important) not true in any relevant way. Everyone is capable of both good and evil. Everyone deserves human rights. I would even say this would be true for non-human intelligent species. Ethics is a rational philosophy which theoretically any intelligent actor could understand. Any species smart enough to communicate with us should also be smart enough to be capable of seeing the benefits of peace between us.

I consider bioessentialism one of those deeply false and harmful ideas that simply should never be a part of good worldbuilding. Following that rule gives you the opportunity to write fascinating stories about making peace with the orcs, befriending a goblin, working alongside a troll. Terry Pratchett was doing this long before it was cool, and making incredible plots about it.

Seek Out New Life, or Humanity Fuck Yeah?

Science fiction can also fall prey to bioessentialism, or it can deliberately reject it. Star Trek has pushed back against it since the beginning. Instead of monsters from outer space, it gave us people who are unlike us, but at the same time, enough like us in essence that we are able to reach across the gap and find common ground. Spock was the first, where we learned that a person might look like a devil (really, that was how they meant him to look!) and interact differently while still being on our side. Next Generation opened with giant space jellyfish, lest we think there is a minimum bar for how human something has to be for us to care. Deep Space Nine built complex, deep cultures and let us see that different ways of living can enrich us.

Star Trek began during the Cold War, which helps explain why that message was so deeply important at the time to the creators. They saw that humanity was on the verge of destroying itself because of people’s incapacity to see the Other as human, to reach across differences to seek peace. That was the whole theme. We go out into space not to conquer, but to seek out new life and new civilizations. To learn from them and to make peace with them. It was a bold idea for a show—how can you manage to have adventures at all under those constraints? And yet they did, in series after series for many, many years.

(Unfortunately, I can’t say “to this day,” because they’ve been abandoning that theme lately in Strange New Worlds. The Gorn, originally created to be an example of the theme of peace I was just describing, have become an implacable foe that there’s no point in bothering to communicate with. And last night, I watched an episode that it’s hard to interpret in any way but a racist one. When characters are given a serum to change their species, they develop a bunch of stereotyped (and autism-coded) traits and one of them straight-up turns evil. That’s exactly the kind of thing I’m talking about: ignoring a person’s history and choices to act like they are determined entirely by their genes.

The whole thing was played as a joke, but I still feel it was an enormous mistake. That is not how reality works, and it goes so directly against the main theme of Star Trek.)

The counter to the traditional Star Trek “befriend new species” theme is a new subgenre they’re calling “Humanity Fuck Yeah!” or HFY. This subgenre is about humanity being great and special and all the other aliens being less cool and perhaps deserving of conquest. Its proponents argue that since every single person we have ever known and probably ever will know is human, having a circle of care limited to humans isn’t a moral problem. 

But I would argue that the stories we tell are always about our own lives, through any number of veils and parallels. We write about characters we see ourselves in, making choices we would (or wouldn’t) make, if we were in their shoes. And I’d like to think that if we were in the situation of meeting aliens, we’d do it with the same kindness we should use on other humans.

Is peace an option?

I had begun to write a tamer piece about the times we choose to write a story of black-and-white morality with implacable enemies, versus times we choose to write about more nuanced situations where peace is at least theoretically possible. But after thinking it over, I kind of wonder if there really is any place for the first kind of story. Pure evil doesn’t actually exist. Intelligent beings who are incapable of goodness do not exist. So why are we roleplaying a reality where it does? Does it do real harm to train ourselves on the idea of evil that must be eliminated?

Human potential for both good and evil is wide open. We are born with a whole array of instincts from empathy and revenge. Our lives are one long training field where we choose which instincts to feed and which to starve. I don’t want to be a killjoy and say you can never do anything but train for virtue. But I also don’t think we can afford to train for vice. Especially when writing a book, which necessarily is a labor of love and massive quantities of time and effort, it makes sense to put our whole heart into it and speak the truth.

The truth is that no one is ever born evil. No nation or race is past redemption. Peace is always a possibility, even if it’s not one we always achieve. 

Authors will sometimes say, “But that’s the way it is in my universe! The bad guys are evil bugs that there’s no reasoning with! Obviously I had no choice but to have my characters nuke them from orbit. I wasn’t trying to make any particular point.” And it’s like—my sibling in Surak, you made up the universe. You didn’t have to write that story. If you didn’t want to preach that lesson, you could have picked a different one.

But it isn’t the same

Now it would be completely fair to say, “But aliens aren’t actually human races. The reason racism is bad is because all humans are the same species. Aliens are different species, so naturally they’re genuinely different!”

And that’s true. While it would be wrong to say “French people are naturally smarter than American people” because humanity is all running more or less the same hardware, it wouldn’t be wrong to say “Vulcans are naturally smarter than humans,” because they could literally have twice the neural connections. That’s just realistic worldbuilding; we can’t expect all species to have the same abilities, any more than the same lifespan or the same biological needs.

But that doesn’t actually change the ethical aspect of it at all. The reason racism is bad isn’t that we’re all actually the same. (If it were, ableism would be fine I guess!) It’s that all of us have rights, regardless. I think the anti-racism message can be even stronger when you say, “Yes, my orc friend is nine feet tall and eats her meat raw and speaks a language that would destroy my epiglottis if I tried to speak it. But she is a person and equal to me in every way.”

Then they can say, well, what about species personalities? Can’t we have some species be naturally aggressive and some be naturally devious? And there’s where it gets kind of hairy. Because yes, you wouldn’t expect all species to have the exact same panel of instincts. Predators would likely be more aggressive than us, prey creatures less so. But at the same time, I think there comes a point in evolution in which you are a lot more what you choose to be than what your genes dictate. Species build whole cultures, and a species advanced enough to develop language and space travel and so on has already learned to cooperate. So I would like to think basic morality is something we would have in common, at which point individuals will learn to govern their less-positive instincts.

The reason bioessentialism is so pervasive is that our genes do matter. One extra chromosome can have drastic effects on your health and ability level. Some of us have inborn impulse-control problems, others are born hyperempathetic. The point is that they don’t matter ethically, because a person remains a person.

What that means is that every non-human person you write should be written as a person. A person with talents and flaws, but not as a naturally bad person.

I don’t want to go too far afield, but I think the same is true of cultures. Yes, aliens would have extremely different cultures, and yes, some of those cultures may have flaws. (Your own culture might too!) But I think we should write them like we would a real culture: nuanced, with good and bad traits. If this alien planet has an aggressively imperialist government, the citizens of that government are some of its primary victims. What kind of culture might they build if they were free of that government? What songs do they sing, what tea do they drink?

Star Trek’s portrayal of the Ferengi is one of my favorites, because the Ferengi culture is indeed pretty toxic! They deify greed and oppress women. The humans don’t have to respect that part. At the same time, the human characters don’t try to force Ferengi into adopting human cultures. Instead, they support Ferengi women who appear in the show. Ultimately, cultural change comes from within. And we see positive things too, like when Nog teaches Jake how to bargain and trade, trusting in “the Great Material Continuum” to bring him the right gift for his dad.

How to humanize aliens write aliens as persons

In the article I linked way back at the beginning, I pointed out that it’s possible for an author to bully the reader through bullying some of their characters. It’s possible to write characters in such a contemptuous way that the author’s biases are on plain display.

Obviously no aliens will be reading your book in the near future. But there’s still something mean-spirited about this kind of narration. If it comes in your character’s point of view, it’ll make us judge them pretty harshly.

Imagine an alien species that was super obnoxious. Something about their culture means that everything they do is just a little bit abrasive; they love to argue or they drool everywhere or whatever. Shouldn’t any decent character still view them as a person? They can be a little annoyed or grossed out, but they shouldn’t descend to mockery or mean-spiritedness. 

And that’s why my rule of thumb for writing non-human characters is to consider all the same things I would consider when writing a human character who was in some way foreign to me or marginalized. If I am writing a person, I give them all the respect due to a person in fiction.

Here’s a list of a few things I like to consider:

• Is the character an individual, or are all their traits species traits—they’re just a stereotype of their species, and we can assume all of their species is just like them?
• Does the narration dwell on their personhood, or only on their off-putting differences? I like to dwell on differences just enough to let the characters struggle with them a bit. Yes, it’s weird that Karnath, in Bisection, smiles like an uncanny-valley frog! But Tria can easily move past that to focus what he’s trying to do, make her feel welcome.
• If there is an evil alien, I like to show other members of the species who are good. Just like if you have a gay villain, you should probably have some other gay characters who aren’t villains to make sure your representation is more diverse, I think it’s good to do with aliens. At the very least, we should know that there are some good ones.
• Is their culture respected as well as their biology? If their culture has flaws, can they be combatted without disrespecting the whole thing? Do humans expect aliens to become more human-like, such that only aliens who adopt human cultural standards are seen as good?
• Do they only have to adapt to human ways, or do the human characters make an effort to adapt to them? If there is one alien on a spaceship crew, are their quarters comfortable to them, are they able to access food they like to eat, do we see their unique senses adapted to? (Bonus: if the ship adapts to alien senses and abilities, it will also adapt to disabled people. Letting us see a universe that is flexible in these things is always nice.) If the answer is no, we should notice that!
• Remember that the human characters and culture will be read by the readers as “us” rather than “them.” So if there’s a lesson you want to convey, have the humans learn it. Don’t give a negative trait to aliens so that the humans can crow that it’s great we don’t have it. “Wow this vice is unpleasant in other people, glad I never suffer from it myself” isn’t much of a lesson.
• Prejudice toward aliens can exist in the story. But, just as with other vices, it shouldn’t be condoned by the narrative. A charitable and thoughtful reader should be able to figure out you don’t think it’s okay.
• Try not to code them as a direct parallel to any single real-life race or culture unless it’s your own. If you give them traits belonging to one culture, give them others from a different one, and some that are completely fresh. Otherwise, it’s going to sound like your referendum on real-life people, and everything that species does is going to sound like it’s meant as a reflection on them.

This is just a beginning, a few basic things I think are worth thinking of when you write non-human characters. I could write a whole other essay on how Star Trek has sometimes followed these and sometimes broken every rule on the list. A story can still be good if its representation of alien characters isn’t perfect. But I do think it’s important to make an effort, ultimately stressing these points:

Biology isn’t destiny.

Any being who is a person is deserving of rights and capable of ethics.

Space racism mirrors real racism; avoid it (except, of course, as an in-book bad behavior).