I, Alien

INTRODUCTION by Mike Resnick

SCIENCE FICTION LOVES aliens. We’ve had cute aliens, frightening aliens, brilliant aliens, stupid aliens, friendly aliens, hate-filled aliens, lustful aliens, aliens who think and sound just like us, and aliens whom we will never begin to understand.

The true alien is a cipher that doesn’t serve much use in science fiction. If he exists—excuse me: if it exists—it probably breathes methane, excretes bricks, smells colors, reproduces by budding, and has totally different concepts (if it has any at all) of love, hate, fear, and pain.

So, very early on, science fiction writers learned to use aliens as metaphors for various aspects of the human condition—as a funhouse mirror they could hold up to humanity to examine whatever happens to be pleasing or annoying the writer that particular day.

The history of science fiction is filled with aliens, many of whom became more popular than the humans from the same stories. You can go all the way back to Tars Tarkas in the Martian stories of Edgar Rice Burroughs; the whole crew of Second Stage Lensmen in Doc Smith’s Lensman saga; Tweel in Stanley G. Weinbaum’s “A Martian Odyssey”; and on through memorable and beloved aliens created by Eric Frank Russell, Roger Zelazny, Vonda Mclntyre, and dozens of others, right up to Chewbacca in the Star Wars saga.

Every science fiction writer has created aliens at one time or another. Even Isaac Asimov, who populated his robotic and Foundation futures with nothing but humans, eventually got around to it in The Gods Themselves. And certainly every writer in this book has created aliens in previous stories.

But this time we asked them to do something different. Remember that I said aliens were incomprehensible? Well, not anymore—because each author was asked to write a story in the first person of an alien. The aliens in these stories are not just the main characters; they’re the narrators.

Last year I edited Men Writing Science Fiction as Women and Women Writing Science Fiction as Men for DAW Books. Those were nice imaginative stretches, but nothing compared to the stretching the authors in this book were asked to do.

And, being science fiction writers, they succeeded in ways that surprised even the editor.