Alien State Space: What Our Imagined Others Reveal About Us
Introduction
Science fiction doesn’t so much invent aliens as project them. Our imagined others are not so much visitors from distant stars as reflections of the structures that already shape us: war, hierarchy, language, evolution, decay. What we call “aliens” are types - which we can represent within a multidimensional phase space of possible typologies.
Let’s call that conceptual volume the Alien-Type State Space.
Each alien type is a point within this space: so what could be the dimensions?
- Embodiment
- Cognition
- Sociality
- Epistemology
- Metaphysical Depth.
The history of science-fiction traces a path through this space: revealing how dominant alien archetypes evolved in response to historical pressures and concerns.
1. Defining the Alien State Space
We propose five principal axes:
1. Embodiment-Type: From carbon-based or mechanical to nonphysical or post-material.
2. Cognition-Level: From conscious, self-aware agency to purely reactive or algorithmic function.
3. Sociality-Degree: From radical individualism to hive or group mind.
4. Epistemological-Communicative sophistication: From symbolic and reflective (language, art, theory of mind) to instinctual, behavioural, or opaque.
5. Ontological-Incarnation: From finite and mortal to transcendent or godlike.
Each alien type is represented as a point in this 5D space; they represent recurring structural metaphors in SF.
2. Representative Alien Types
Below, we categorise several commonly recurring types along this framework, with literary examples drawn from authors of interest.
A. Philosopher-Gods
Transcendent, post-material, highly symbolic, usually solitary or diffusely networked.
Examples: The Sublimed (Banks), Overlords (Clarke), Monolith Builders (Kubrick/Clarke), the Xeelee (Baxter), Hoyle’s Black Cloud.
B. Mirror-Image Predators
Anthropomorphic, warlike, mortal. Often framed as evolved apex competitors.
Examples: Kzin (Niven), the Shrike (Simmons), Bugs (Heinlein in Starship Troopers).
C. Hive Intelligences
Collective minds with diminished or alien individual agency. Sometimes tragic, sometimes terrifying.
Examples: Formics (Card), Inhibitors (Reynolds in his Revelation Space universe), the group-minds of Vernon Vinge.
D. Mind-Blind Systems
High-functioning but unconscious; driven by structure, not mind. These are the true aliens of 2025.
Examples: Scramblers (Peter Watts), sub-agents of the polises in Diaspora (Greg Egan), runaway markets (Richard K. Morgan).
E. Embodied Alien Consciousness
Truly-alien but internally-rich others with whom contact is possible, but not without risk or loss.
Examples: Heptapods (Ted Chiang in Arrival), Dwellers (Iain M. Banks in The Algebraist), The Master Race (cybernetic overlords in William Barton's When Heaven Fell), the Ariekei in China Miéville’s Embassytown.
These aren’t static taxonomies. They are literary attractors - forms we return to, again and again, to explore what might be.
3. Historical Drift Through the State Space
If we chart the trajectory of dominant alien types over time, a rough pattern emerges:
1950s–60s: Mirror Predators and Bureaucratic Invaders. Cold War neuroses rendered in latex and rayguns. Aliens as totalitarian or hyper-rational threats.
1970s–80s: Hive Intelligences and Parasitic Others. A turn inward - body horror, infiltration, the unconscious. Post-Vietnam, post-Watergate, post-trust.
1990s–2000s: Philosopher-Gods. SF becomes theological. Ascension, transcendence, mysticism. The alien as vector of enlightenment... or obliteration.
2010s–2020s: Mind-Blind Systems. The alien as emergent, impersonal process: Climate, AI, Markets. These entities don’t hate us. They don’t even register us.
What has changed is not the aliens. It’s our sense of what has salient, malevolent agency in the world.
4. Why It Matters
Aliens reveal not what we expect to meet, but what we already fear we’re ruled by.
The dominant alien type today is not a warrior or a guru; it’s the process: non-conscious, non-negotiable, causally powerful. Peter Watts’ Scramblers in Blindsight are emblematic: they out-think us without ever becoming someone. They have no interiority - just an indifferent, dismissive competence.
We see the same template in our own systems:
- Language models that imitate understanding.
- Capital flows that no one directs.
- Climate feedbacks that behave like algorithms.
You can’t plead with them. You can’t even speak to them. They are alien not because they are elsewhere, but because they are here with their own bulldozing dynamic: unempathic and utterly disinterested with regard to humanity and its concerns.
5. Implications for SF
The future of science fiction is not contact; it’s comprehension failure. Stanisław Lem might have been the trailblazer here, most notably with Solaris, and His Master's Voice.
The most insightful new stories will not be about the arrival of aliens, but about recognising that we are already inside them... The alien is the system we built, the ecosystem we destabilised, the algorithm we can’t switch off. This is the profound comprehension failure we must now grapple with: the alien may take your job, dominate your life... and it doesn’t even know you're here.
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