Thoughts on “The Sleeping Giant”: What would meeting an alien intelligence really be like?

by Kedrick Brown

Learn how Kedrick Brown’s examination of past concepts of intelligent alien life informed his newest story, The Sleeping Giant, available to read in our [September/October issue, on sale now!]

In my third Analog story The Sleeping Giant, I introduce a powerful alien intelligence that inhabits a very different reality.

To write The Sleeping Giant, I had to start from an appreciation of how aliens are typically described in science fiction. I think of this loosely as on a grid where one axis ranges from hostile to benevolent and the other axis ranges from anthropomorphic to non-anthropomorphic. I chose to end the story on a cliffhanger, making it potentially like an introduction to a larger story. This approach gives me adequate room to explain why the world that the alien inhabits is far removed from human experience. It also ensures that the reader clearly understands the moment when the alien first interacts with humanity, in contrast to nearly all characters in the story.

One very popular trope involves aliens invading Earth to secure a better habitat for themselves. Typically some kind of challenge on their home planet leads them to see Earth as a haven to be conquered and take steps to do so. There are numerous stories of this type, famously including H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds.

Although this trope has provided entertainment for decades, I see it as a form of reflection on the troubled history of human wars of conquest. The aliens in these tales often have human motivations, no matter how twisted, and thus invade Earth for reasons that humans can easily understand. This makes them both hostile and anthropomorphic.

In contrast, fictional species like the Vulcans of Star Trek are far more benevolent towards humans. However, benevolent aliens of this type share a key similarity with the former hostile ones. Both types of aliens afford humans a certain degree of respect as a species capable of complex abstract thought and related real world actions.

Stories featuring aliens similar to the Vulcans can thus also be seen as reflections on the way humans have related to each other over time, as the aliens in them have recognizable motivations and behavior. This makes these aliens benevolent and anthropomorphic.

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In my view, an alien intelligence with the means to quickly reach Earth across the vastness of interstellar space would likely be incomprehensibly powerful, and thus concerned with matters far outside the realm of human experience. Matters of everyday interest to an intelligence like this might well be beyond the ability of human language to explain, and any actions it might take towards humanity could easily have conflicting interpretations.

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There are numerous other examples in this imaginary grid. For example in the move 2001, an advanced but aloof alien intelligence slowly nudges humanity forward, making it somewhat benevolent but non-anthropomorphic. In the movie Prometheus, an alien species that had a hand in humanity’s creation nevertheless still poses a great danger to it, making it a different version of hostile but anthropomorphic. Finally, the cosmic horror of flawed author H.P. Lovecraft contains several creatures that may be thought of as hostile but decidedly non-anthropomorphic.

In my view, an alien intelligence with the means to quickly reach Earth across the vastness of interstellar space would likely be incomprehensibly powerful, and thus concerned with matters far outside the realm of human experience. Matters of everyday interest to an intelligence like this might well be beyond the ability of human language to explain, and any actions it might take towards humanity could easily have conflicting interpretations. As such, an alien of this type could easily be non-anthropomorphic with unclear (or difficult to decipher) motivations.

So how does one even begin to describe such an intelligence? I got an inspirational idea from a graduate class I took in applied physics, during which I worked in a research lab and gained a better understanding of how microchips are made. My final research report in this class was on diffractive optics, a field that describes how light can be redirected by utilizing its wave nature. I learned a lot in the process, coming up with an interesting story question afterwards:

What if a diffractive optics tool could redirect light moving through a hidden dimension of space so that it’s noticed by a being that can sense light in that hidden dimension?

To explore this question I had to draw analogies between scenarios that are easily understandable to humans in three spatial dimensions and their possible counterparts in four spatial dimensions. I explore these analogies through the reasoning and discussions of a pair of characters that ultimately become fascinated with answering the story question above.

Since an alien that lives in four dimensional space would exist in a world with almost no similarity to our own, I allowed mine to show only the emotion of curiosity, which is of course not exclusive to humans. However, its curiosity is understandably misinterpreted by nearly all characters in the story. 

If you are interested in finding out what these main characters discover, I invite you to read The Sleeping Giant. As humanity learns more about the vast cosmos around us, it will be important for us to stay open-minded about what we might find in our explorations, and be prepared for a wide variety of possibilities. Science fiction is a great tool for doing so, as it allows writers to imagine both aliens that act like humans and aliens that act decidedly differently. I look forward to reading what writers invent in this area in the future.

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Kedrick Brown, now residing in Boston, MA, believes in the power of stories to inspire amazing forms of human cooperation. He debuted in science fiction with the story “The Actor,” winner of the inaugural Analog Award for Emerging Black Voices. He is also published in F&SF.