The Road Often Taken
"The Road Not Taken" and how authors write aliens
I was recently thinking again about Harry Turtledove's famous science fiction story "The Road Not Taken." In the story, Earth - vaguely implied to be in the 1980's when the story was written - gets invaded by alien conquistadores armed with flintlock muskets. It turns out that stardrive is very easy to discover and build; humans just happened to never notice it. Every other race discovered hyperdrive at a much lower tech level, and then "all their creative energy would naturally go into refining and improving it." So, every other race is stuck with flintlock muskets and no way to renew the air in their starships.
Of course, at the end of this story, humanity - with our technological lead - is set to conquer known space. Hopefully we'll be benevolent. But let's not talk about that.
In fact, Turtledove had written that other story the year before: "Herbig-Haro." We see that, after "The Road Not Taken," humanity established a large empire, which eventually dissolved into inter-human squabbles, leaving people "picking over the pieces" of its ruins. Then, twelve hundred years later, our protagonist discovers a new race - one that didn't get hyperdrive till even later than humans, and is even more technologically advanced.
The best part of these stories is the concepts - and they're great concepts. They've stuck with me for years. Let's dig into a couple of them.
One thing that's stuck with me from the first time I read this story is how closely the culture of these invading aliens - called the Roxolani - resembles historical human culture. It's almost the same as early modern European culture.
A human observing the Roxolani leaving the spaceship - armed with matchlock guns - quickly notices that they look like bears and arrange themselves like "the professional, disciplined armies" of "the European nation-states in the sixteenth century." The rest of the story backs this up. These aliens are not just at a similar tech level; they don't just send out colonizing ships like them; they act like sixteenth-century Europeans in detail.
This might seem unimaginative when presented like this. But, I'm not blaming Turtledove. If pressed on this, I'm guessing he'd say he was just making it simple for the story and to make a point. Elsewhere (in his Worldwar series), he's written aliens who're somewhat more alien. Elsewhere (in his excellent short story "Vilcabamba") he's used aliens to make even clearer points. But this extreme case raises an interesting question: how should science-fiction writers write aliens?
Since it's hardly possible for a writer to make up every detail of a functioning species and culture from scratch - and even if someone wanted to try, they'd almost certainly leave gaping holes - writers need to take inspiration from somewhere. That's often animals found on Earth. For example, the invading aliens in Niven and Pournelle's Footfall are essentially sapient elephants; the protagonists in Cherryh's Chanur series are essentially lions; even the excellently done aliens in Vinge's Deepness in the Sky are closely based on spiders. This makes sense, because Earth species really exist and can often be extrapolated to sapient aliens - both in their physical appearance and in their culture.
Here in "The Road Not Taken", Turtledove didn't bother basing Roxolani culture off bears. He took a second option - basing it off a historical Earth culture. That's another frequent choice, more often with human planets but sometimes with aliens too. Star Trek did that so often they even tongue-in-cheek formalized it as "Hodgkin's Law of Parallel Planetary Development." Unfortunately, that was just a throwaway line in the show - I would've liked to see it actually discussed.
The third alternative is often worse. When an author does make up a culture for his aliens without basing it on a model, he can often make it an excuse to preach at or grind an ax against modern culture.
For example, take Heinlein's Martians (most obviously in Stranger in a Strange Land, but also in Red Planet), who visibly exude wisdom, have gained the power of telekinesis from their meditation, and preach a philosophy of togetherness and acceptance. The Organians in Star Trek are another closely-related example of apparently-simple but powerful peaceful aliens. Or from another angle, Delany's Babel-17 shows aliens who've organized their society around the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, a disputed hypothesis that the language you speak limits what thoughts you can envision.
Aliens like this can be good characters in their own right (I really enjoyed Red Planet), but when I think about them, it feels like they've been built to take sides in real-life disagreements. Heinlein's Martians and Star Trek's Organians can be easily read as supporting the 60's counterculture; Delany's aliens are explicitly stated to support the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. If you disagree, their entire characters at least come close to falling apart. So - even when I happen to agree with the author's position - I sigh with disappointment when I'm reading about aliens like this.
But, I see how authors can fall into it. We don't have any actual examples of aliens, much less sapient aliens. We have no idea in what ways they might differ from humans if they really do exist. So, an author trying to imagine them has tremendous freedom. And, for the sake of the story, they should differ from humans in some way that will be relevant to what the author wants to talk about in the story.
This opens the door wide for whatever axes the author wants to grind or whatever points of Earth culture he or she wants to highlight. Even authors who don't make it too obvious can use this point, such as David Brin's Uplift saga where his tradition-bound aliens accentuate humanity's streak of independence.
So, when Turtledove uses the Roxolani to show us a different path of technological development from the one humanity has taken, he's in good company. The brevity of the story merely paints his point in greater relief.
But let's look at that contrast of technological development further.
Aliens having an easy stardrive but not having real-world modern technology is a fascinating idea. Turtledove makes it all the more fascinating by blaming it for how their science and technology have stagnated. But is this plausible?
Looking at the history of science on Earth, I don't think so. Easy transportation didn't hurt technology on Earth; in fact, it helped it by increasing communication and access to markets. For instance, the coal mines of Newcastle would never have developed were it not for the London coal market. Nor would Galileo have been able to use a telescope without regular communication with scientists elsewhere in Europe. It stands to reason that a stardrive would merely accentuate these possibilities. In addition, most of the other factors that led to human technological development - such as wars - would still be around. So, it seems unlikely that the Roxolani and all the other aliens in this story would be stuck at a premodern tech level.
Or perhaps it isn't just the hyperdrive existing? We could take Turtledove's other explanation in "Herbig-Haro": "Trying to explain contragrav and the hyperdrive skews an unsophisticated, developing physics out of shape. With attention focused on them, too, work on other things, like electricity and atomics, never gets started." In fact, one fanfic of the story suggested that the stardrive is still impossible for twentieth-century physics to explain. (This isn't suggested by Turtledove's story, but it's consistent with it.) This's a fun idea, but sadly, I don't think that would've discouraged Roxolani scientists from trying to explore other concepts. There were many things human premodern proto-scientists couldn't begin to explain, such as the tides - but they still tried to explain what they could.
But, this idea's immediately gripping. I can easily suspend my disbelief here. A faster-than-light drive itself requires suspending my disbelief; this requires suspending it a little further, but I can definitely imagine a universe where it might be true and enjoy the story.
I'd love to see the ideas from "The Road Not Taken" explored further - both the concept of aliens with alternate technology paths in general, and these aliens with an easy hyperdrive in particular. There're so many aspects of this universe that could be explored, and so many different angles that could be taken in other fictional universes. Turtledove himself has turned to other genres, but I'd be excited for some other writer to pick it up.
These ideas are the best part of the story. I love the questions they raise about history, and the possibilities the story teases about whether technology could have maybe taken other paths - even if not as dramatically different as the Roxolani.
In Stranger in a Strange Land, at least, Heinlein was treating Valentine Michael Smith as a "man from Mars" in a classic literary sense: An observer of human society and culture from an outside perspective. The characteristic point of such narratives is to point out the follies and weirdnesses of the author's own society. I understand this used to be done with exotic aliens such as Persian visitors to Europe, before intercontinental travel became too easy for that to work. It's sort of the mirror image of Swift's creating analogs of Europe in places like Lilliput and Blefescu and sending a nondescript European, Lemuel Gulliver, to comment on them.
On the other hand, Heinlein's actual Martians did have some traits that reflected speculation about their biology: their curling up and hibernating when offended, their water sharing ritual, their odd reproductive biology in which female and male were different stages of the life cycle of the same organism—and their peaceful cannibalism, though Heinlein couldn't put that into a juvenile. Much of this followed from the idea of Mars as an ancient desert planet, which of course was becoming obsolete even as Heinlein was writing those books.
Polynesians seem like a pretty good parallel on Earth. In the year 1000BC or maybe even 1000AD they had the best ability on the globe to travel long distances. But they used it to create small settlements that failed to develop further technologies.