4. The Alien, the Artificial, and the Extended

Authors have portrayed alien beings along a spectrum of psychological distance from the barely recognisable to the more relatable. We start here with the famously weird and incomprehensible, such as Lem’s sentient sea in Solaris and the beings in Vandermeer’s Area X. We see that an alien lifeworld can be imagined through a radically different sensory presence and extended language and physical communication skills. And a large number of interesting examples come from the extension of the body, either for AI minds to interact with the world, or for superhuman minds to inhabit entire spacecraft.