Nature beats mythology
What strikes me about these monsters from ancient legend, Cerberus...
...Medusa...
...Pegasus...
...is that they are all made up of bits of animals (or animals/people with unusual numbers of parts). It is as if they did not have the imagination to conceive of a completely new being. The same lack of imagination applies to old books on demonology. Demons are also combinations of parts of different animals. A man with a beak for a mouth, a tail and wings. and often horns borrowed from goats.
And here are images of Satan's little helpers (again bits of normal animals stuck together in a human format):
That is why I can't watch Star Trek. I'd like to watch it, to relax with a bit of science fiction, but every F€$£ing alien is simply and clearly a man or woman with heavy makeup on. You can forgive this in the 1960s (and I did).
But these days the makeup has become heavier. And the "aliens" remain human:
...the artistry and craft is there, but the imagination is not.
The film series Men In Black has done much much better...
But nature beats them all. These from the Cambrian Explosion...
Nature has an "imagination" not fettered by feeble human brains.
PS: I wonder why the visual creative imagination of humans was so limited all those centuries ago...?
One of my favourite ‘aliens’ was the one described by Stanislaw Lem in The Invicible - a reconfigurable swarm of small, metallic identical units that would either manifest itself as a cloud or as something more substantial.
ReplyDeleteI've only ever read Solaris by him, but it was pretty impressive, even now. That involved some sort of odd intelligent...thing...life form...
DeleteIn Solaris it is a sentient ocean ...
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