Why We Keep Inventing Other Peoples

An Elf, a Vulcan, and a Minbari walk into a room. Before any of them speaks, a human is likely to feel underqualified.

They know things. They remember things. Their civilizations seem to have been old when ours was still trying to decide what civilization meant. Even their disapproval has accumulated centuries of practice.

The resemblance is more than visual. Across fantasy and science fiction, we keep inventing peoples who occupy recognizable positions beside humanity. There are the ancient and disciplined ones, the fierce and honorable ones, the practical makers, the acquisitive traders, the unsettling collectives. The scenery changes from forest to starship, but some of the relationships remain remarkably familiar.

I think of them as companion peoples: beings with whom humans share an imagined world and, through that sharing, discover something about themselves. “Companion races” is another useful phrase, provided we remember that these stories mix biology, culture, nationality, and political allegiance in ways that would make an actual anthropologist uneasy.

Nor does companion necessarily mean friend. An enemy can remain beside us for centuries. A rival can shape our identity more thoroughly than an ally. Companionship here means an enduring relationship, with all its possibilities for affection, dependency, resentment, and change.

Sometimes the literary mechanism is easy to see. A civilization gives one human impulse a whole society in which to operate. Vulcans make emotional discipline conspicuous. Klingons give martial honor institutions, rituals, and political consequences. Ferengi let commerce become a comprehensive account of existence. These peoples provide distance from familiar behavior, allowing us to examine it before recognizing ourselves.

There is a catch. Humans often retain the privilege of complexity. Other peoples have a defining trait; we have a range. They are logical, warlike, spiritual, or greedy. We can become any of these things, depending on the occasion. Rick Berman described the aliens of Star Trek as ways of exploring different human qualities, a useful account of both the device's strength and its limitation. [Berman on Star Trek's aliens]

The danger is that humanity becomes the complete picture and everybody else a fragment. Our customs disappear into the background while theirs require explanation. We have personalities; they have cultural characteristics.

The more interesting stories begin to disturb that arrangement. A Vulcan disagrees with other Vulcans. An Orc has reasons for distrusting human civilization. An alien society conducts its own affairs without waiting for humanity to give them significance. Gradually, the mirror acquires a life beyond its reflective surface.

This is where companionship becomes a richer idea than symbolism. A people invented to illustrate human aggression can eventually force us to reconsider whom we call aggressive, whose violence we excuse, and whether our original description was ever adequate.

These examples come largely from Anglophone fantasy and science fiction and their screen and game descendants. They form a connected tradition rather than a universal map of the human imagination. Even within that tradition, Tolkien's Elves and a game's Elves may have very different work to do.

Still, the recurrence suggests a persistent desire. We want somebody beside us who is close enough to recognize and different enough to make recognition difficult. Someone whose existence would make humanity a particular way of being, rather than the unquestioned definition of a person.

Perhaps that is part of the attraction of an inhabited universe. We would finally have someone to disagree with about who and what we are.

This post is part of a planned eight part series on imagined peoples, human nature, and companionship with artificial minds