Hello! Welcome to the first lesson in our introduction to science fiction literature.
This course is designed to explore one of the most fascinating challenges in literature: how authors represent non-human consciousness. Over the next few modules, we'll develop a set of analytical tools to examine the specific textual strategies used to build alien minds, moving from human-like perspectives toward attempts at radical difference.
In this foundational lesson, we will focus on identifying the core narrative techniques authors use to signal an alien or non-human point of view. Specifically, you will learn to spot and understand the function of:
- Narrative Voice and Focalization: Who is speaking versus who is seeing?
- Deixis: The linguistic cues that ground a perspective in a specific "here and now."
By the end of this lesson, you'll have a new vocabulary for dissecting how a text constructs a non-human perspective, a skill we'll build on throughout the course.
The Challenge: Representing the Truly Alien
How can a human author, bound by human language and cognition, create a perspective that feels genuinely non-human? This is a central question for science fiction. Writers often fall back on what critic Carl Malmgren calls anthropocentric aliens—beings who are essentially "exaggerations of human traits." They might look different, but they think and feel in fundamentally human ways.
The more ambitious and, for our purposes, more interesting challenge is to create what Malmgren terms "unknowable" aliens. These are beings who are alien at the most basic level, possessing an "essential strangeness." This is where authors must innovate, pushing the boundaries of narrative itself.
To get a feel for this distinction, please watch the following short video. It offers a writer's perspective on common alien tropes and encourages moving beyond them.
5 Sci-Fi Tropes to Avoid (Or Embrace) In Your Writing
This video from the Reedsy channel, '5 Sci-Fi Tropes to Avoid (Or Embrace) In Your Writing', highlights the creative challenge of designing aliens. Pay close attention to the critique of 'humans with different ears' and the praise for more imaginative approaches.
Please watch the sections on 'Aliens Who Look Just Like Humans' (01:06 - 01:47) and 'Unique Alien Takes' (04:06 - 05:46). Notice how the discussion of the film 'Arrival' provides a concrete example of an alien consciousness built around a radically different mode of communication.
To give these ideas a more formal grounding, let's turn to the article where these concepts are discussed in detail.
Self and Other in SF - Alien Encounters
This excerpt from Carl D. Malmgren's article, 'Self and Other in SF: Alien Encounters', establishes the critical framework for our discussion. It formalizes the distinction between human-like and truly alien beings in SF.
Please read the first two pages of the article (pages 15 and 16). Focus on the discussion of 'alien-encounter SF' and the distinction between 'anthropocentric' and 'unknowable' aliens. This will provide the key terminology for our analysis.
Building Your Analytical Toolkit
Now that we have a grasp of the creative problem, let's equip ourselves with the narratological tools to analyze how authors tackle it. Given your background in English Literature, you're likely familiar with narrative voice (first-person, third-person omniscient, etc.). We'll refine this with two more precise concepts: focalization and deixis.
Focalization: Who Sees?
Focalization refers to the perspective through which the story's events are filtered. It's about the consciousness or point of view that perceives the narrative world. This is distinct from the narrator. For example, a third-person narrator (who is not a character in the story) can still present events exclusively through the eyes, thoughts, and feelings of a single character. This is called internal focalization.
When an author wants to represent an alien consciousness, they often use a third-person narrative that is internally focalized through the alien character. This allows the reader to access the alien's thoughts and interpretations directly, without the story being told in the alien's own "voice" (which might be unreadable).
Deixis and the Deictic Center
This brings us to a more technical, but powerful, linguistic tool: deixis.
Deixis (from the Greek for 'pointing') refers to words whose meaning depends on the context of the utterance. They anchor a statement in a specific time, place, and social reality.
- Person deixis: I, you, we, they
- Spatial deixis: here, there, this, that
- Temporal deixis: now, then, today, yesterday
These words create what is called a deictic center—the speaker's "I-here-now" perspective. When we read a story, we perform a cognitive leap known as a deictic shift. We temporarily abandon our own deictic center and adopt the one presented in the text, projecting ourselves into the character's perspective.
This is the very mechanism that allows us to experience the world through a non-human consciousness. By carefully controlling the deictic expressions, an author can force us to interpret the world from an alien deictic center.
The following resource provides a clear introduction to these linguistic concepts.
A Study of Deictic Shift Theory as a Stylistic Approach in
This paper, 'A Study of Deictic Shift Theory as a Stylistic Approach', offers concise definitions of the key concepts we've just discussed. It will help you formalize your understanding of how perspective is linguistically constructed.
Please read the following sections to solidify your understanding: The Abstract and Introduction (Section 1) for an overview. 'The Phenomenon of Deixis' (Section 3) for definitions and categories of deictic terms. 'Deictic Shift Theory' (Section 4) to understand how readers are drawn into a narrative perspective. 'The Concept of Deictic Center' (Section 5) to grasp the anchor point of a viewpoint. Focus on the definitions and the examples provided.
Case Study: A Human on a Death World
Now, let's put our new toolkit to work. The following video tells a short sci-fi story entirely from the perspective of an alien commander surveying Earth for the first time. It is a prime example of how focalization and deixis are used to construct a non-human consciousness.
Aliens Needed Full Hazmat Suits—Human Walked Out in Shorts Saying 'Feels Like Spring' | HFY | SCI-FI
This story from the Sci-Fi Zone channel, titled 'Aliens Needed Full Hazmat Suits', presents a classic alien-encounter scenario. We will use it to identify the narrative techniques we've just learned about in action.
Please watch the following parts of the story: 'Initial Alien Assessment of Earth' (00:00 - 03:34) 'First Contact and Human Behavior' (05:56 - 10:20) 'Final Classification and Recommendation' (38:28 - 47:34) As you watch, pay close attention to how Commander Thrax perceives and describes Earth and its human inhabitant, Jake.
Test your understanding!
Now, let's analyze the story using our toolkit:
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Focalization: Through which character’s consciousness do we primarily experience the story? What specific evidence in the text (e.g., descriptions of feelings, thoughts, or sensory input) tells you this?
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Deixis: Identify a few examples of language used by Commander Thrax that establish his alien deictic center. How do these words contrast with Jake Murphy's language and his perception of the same environment?
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Overall Effect: How do focalization and the clash of deictic centers combine to make a familiar scene (a man walking his dog on a spring day) seem strange and dangerous?
Show answer
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Focalization: The story is focalized through Commander Thrax. We have direct access to his internal state and thoughts. For example: "Thrax floated over to the scanning console, his tentacles already twitching with the bad feeling he always got before paperwork heavy incidents." The narration also reports his internal shock and disbelief: "Nothing about this planet made sense." We only know what Jake is thinking or feeling through Thrax's external observations and interpretations.
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Deixis: Thrax's deictic center is one of extreme caution and scientific measurement. He refers to Earth's atmosphere as "basically flammable air" and rain as "aggressive precipitation." His reality is defined by "protocol 7 niner delta" and threat assessments. In stark contrast, Jake's deictic center is casual and sensory. For him, the same environment is simply "perfect spring weather," where the temperature is a pleasant "45 degrees." The coffee from a "gas station" is normal, not a beverage from a "station that dispenses flammable fuel." The clash between these two sets of descriptive terms creates the central conflict of perspective.
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Overall Effect: By locking the reader into Thrax's focalized perspective, the story forces us to adopt his deictic center. We are made to feel his anxiety and confusion. Jake's ordinary actions—wearing "shorts and a t-shirt," patting a dog ("a domesticated earth predator"), drinking coffee—are described by Thrax in a detached, analytical, and alarmed tone. This technique, called defamiliarization, makes the utterly mundane seem bizarre and life-threatening. The reader understands Jake's actions are normal, but is forced to experience them as alien.
Conclusion
In this lesson, we've established the foundational toolkit for our course. You've learned to distinguish between anthropocentric and more radically "unknowable" aliens, and you've been introduced to the key narrative techniques authors use to construct these perspectives:
- Focalization: Allowing the reader to see the world through a non-human character's consciousness.
- Deictic Shift: Linguistically forcing the reader to adopt an alien's "I-here-now" frame of reference.
As we saw in the case study, these techniques are often used to create an effect of defamiliarization, where the familiar is made to seem strange. This will be the central topic of our next lesson. We will explore how authors use defamiliarization to represent alien sensory experiences and conceptual frameworks that challenge our own.