What Are You Trying To Sell Me, Monolith?
The Greatest and Most Terrible Marketing Ploy In History, or Kubrick-loving aliens?
Two Kinds of Aliens
There are two kinds of aliens in this world: those who have done their homework, and those who haven’t. In the latter category you’ve got your sentient clouds, your colors from space, your discs that hover just on the edge of sight. Boring stuff. In the former category you’ve got your flying saucers, tripods, green men, grey men, unemotive human simulacra, and — you guessed it — monoliths.
These are the aliens that took the time to watch a little sci-fi before making the interstellar journey.
By the way, if we ever visit alien planets, in some distant Star Trek-like future (which I hope you’ll agree with me happens to be the only important utopian vision in literature), Star Fleet Command will have to have a Science-Fiction Department: a group that will consume the target-planet’s sci fi and tell us how to choose a form in which to approach them so that they can understand what we are.
I bet their list of tropes will be more or less similar to ours. The little green men are the most fun. The human simulacra you save for when you need to intervene in a nuclear arms race. You take the form of flying…