Alien motives and human assumptions
What Would They Even Want?
Invasion stories almost always begin by assuming the visitors want what humans have historically fought over. That assumption is a statement about us.
Established ScienceEvery motive humanity assigned to the object was a motive humanity had already acted on.
What we actually know
Human conflict has been organised around land, water, arable soil, fuel, and labour, because those were the scarce things within reach. Every one of those categories is a local scarcity, produced by living on a single planet with a fixed surface area and a shallow energy budget.
Where the extrapolation begins
A civilisation able to cross interstellar distance has already solved energy and transport at a scale that makes terrestrial scarcity irrelevant. Projecting our scarcities onto it is not caution. It is autobiography.
What the novel invents
The novel never states what the Servators want. Characters supply motives constantly, and the motives they supply describe the characters who supply them with uncomfortable accuracy.
Questions to think about
- — List the motives you assumed before reading this page. Where did each one come from?
- — Which human wants are consequences of living on one planet rather than facts about minds?
- — Can you describe a want that no human civilisation has ever had?
Where to read next
- — Fermi paradox literature on motive assumptions
- — History of resource-driven conflict as a framing device in early SF
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