Reviews

Aliens and Alien Societies by Stanley Schmidt, Ben Bova

johnayliff's review

4.0

A decent resource for a writer wanting to create scientifically plausible aliens, although I wouldn't call it essential. Not an exhaustive guide, but a good set of things to avoid and things to think about doing. The emphasis is on aliens unlike but not too unlike humans: creatures that could not be played by a human actor in a suit, but which are recognisable as biological entities, with a culture that is recognisable as a culture, and so forth. The author's specialisation in physics shows: as the book moves from astronomy to chemistry to biology to language to culture, it becomes less rigorous and more reliant on examples from existing science fiction.