sf supernatural monsters
Feb. 16th, 2026 11:54 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silverflight8Something that I just don't usually do well with in sf/f is unnatural monsters presented in a scientific-ish context.
Admittedly I'm not into horror for horror, so I'm definitely missing a piece of the enjoyment that lets a fan of e.g. monstrous characters/enemies overlook other stuff - "OK the plot isn't great but I really liked the minotaur so it was worth the trade off!" which is definitely something I do for stuff that I care about, like interesting worldbuilding. Everyone's got their preferences and IMO it's not worth interrogating past that, sometimes you just like what you like. But the problem is the suspension of disbelief and the way that it breaks mine when sf tries to talk about horrifying supernatural monsters in a scientific context because then: WE HAVE BROUGHT IN BIOLOGY. (Oh no.)
I find a lot of horror wants to play off that fear that this monster is so much better than humans so we are helpless against it. OK. But unfortunately I cannot stop thinking about biology, and also, what underpins biology: energy. First, the biology part - there are lots of animals and not-animals here, today, in the past, that are better than humans on just about any axis. It's kind of what happens when you compare 1 species against, you know, several hundred millions of other species. There isn't really an apex of all apexes, there was no cosmic race to do that, and also no reason to do so. A species exists in a time and place and its unique constraints. Pretty much nothing is adapted to every conceivable environment - why should it be? And every species and individual makes trade offs because energy is not infinite. There are lots of advantages to being warm blooded like a human (being able to move! running from danger! actively capturing things!) but also lots of disadvantages (the number of calories you have to consume is staggeringly more than cold blooded, not to mention plants! you're limited by the productivity of the prey you eat!) There's not exactly a hard-and-fast rule that says anaerobic life forms are better at life than aerobic, I'm sorry. Each of them generally does extremely poorly in the wrong environment. As you add complexity you add to the number of ways things can go wrong, you add to the cost of maintaining all that infrastructure...It's always bothered me when the aliens are so much better for monstrous reasons just because Doylistically, that makes them scary. OK, but what does make them able to exist better than us in hard vacuum and in a hyperoxygenated environment like Earth? (Have you seen what oxygen does to stuff that has never been exposed to oxygen before? What it did to all the rocks that were present on the planet when it happened? The effects are still visible several billion years later. Have you thought about fire and why it does really well here and not elsewhere?) If they move faster than us, does that mean they need more energy? What about their joints? This is a part of my brain I am apparently unable to shut off if the context invites any kind of biological scrutiny. We are humans writing for other humans, we know our limitations imposed by biology and physics because obviously, we inhabit these bodies and have first-hand knowledge, which is unconsciously integrated into our art. When monsters are written this way, they appear to have no limits, and I find that weirdly frustrating. Not to mention the worldbuilding pretzel I find hard to respect when the monster is actually custom-designed to be extra scary or good at killing/destroying humans, when they did not know about humans - it's just too much Ah How Convenient, Humans Are The Center of the Universe (Negative Edition) to me. I'd respect it more if a monster was like "oh I have discovered Humans are a great snack, didn't know they existed!" rather than some cosmically horrifying this has always been out there to hunt you, a Very Important Organism from the Center of the Universe* statement. I don't think these concerns bother other people who like the genre, or use these concepts, it's just me. They wake up every ounce of my but actuallyyyy instincts and then I stop enjoying it as a book**.
I'm OK with totally magical (often in fantasy) monsters, since it just says OK, ignore all physical realities, this is something else. That's fine. I just can't with the halfsies position here.
(Indeed I did not enjoy Blindsight [I believe this is Peter Watts' exercise in despair], nor Into the Drowning Deep, nor right now, Leviathan Wakes.)
*Pretty sure we're in a backwater actually
** Actually I also don't appreciate, this time from a narrative perspective, the way many of those also do a late-book shift into re-examining the horrifying bits as Actually This is Beautiful, which I find both twee and irritating. THIS IS JUST NOT FOR ME
Admittedly I'm not into horror for horror, so I'm definitely missing a piece of the enjoyment that lets a fan of e.g. monstrous characters/enemies overlook other stuff - "OK the plot isn't great but I really liked the minotaur so it was worth the trade off!" which is definitely something I do for stuff that I care about, like interesting worldbuilding. Everyone's got their preferences and IMO it's not worth interrogating past that, sometimes you just like what you like. But the problem is the suspension of disbelief and the way that it breaks mine when sf tries to talk about horrifying supernatural monsters in a scientific context because then: WE HAVE BROUGHT IN BIOLOGY. (Oh no.)
I find a lot of horror wants to play off that fear that this monster is so much better than humans so we are helpless against it. OK. But unfortunately I cannot stop thinking about biology, and also, what underpins biology: energy. First, the biology part - there are lots of animals and not-animals here, today, in the past, that are better than humans on just about any axis. It's kind of what happens when you compare 1 species against, you know, several hundred millions of other species. There isn't really an apex of all apexes, there was no cosmic race to do that, and also no reason to do so. A species exists in a time and place and its unique constraints. Pretty much nothing is adapted to every conceivable environment - why should it be? And every species and individual makes trade offs because energy is not infinite. There are lots of advantages to being warm blooded like a human (being able to move! running from danger! actively capturing things!) but also lots of disadvantages (the number of calories you have to consume is staggeringly more than cold blooded, not to mention plants! you're limited by the productivity of the prey you eat!) There's not exactly a hard-and-fast rule that says anaerobic life forms are better at life than aerobic, I'm sorry. Each of them generally does extremely poorly in the wrong environment. As you add complexity you add to the number of ways things can go wrong, you add to the cost of maintaining all that infrastructure...It's always bothered me when the aliens are so much better for monstrous reasons just because Doylistically, that makes them scary. OK, but what does make them able to exist better than us in hard vacuum and in a hyperoxygenated environment like Earth? (Have you seen what oxygen does to stuff that has never been exposed to oxygen before? What it did to all the rocks that were present on the planet when it happened? The effects are still visible several billion years later. Have you thought about fire and why it does really well here and not elsewhere?) If they move faster than us, does that mean they need more energy? What about their joints? This is a part of my brain I am apparently unable to shut off if the context invites any kind of biological scrutiny. We are humans writing for other humans, we know our limitations imposed by biology and physics because obviously, we inhabit these bodies and have first-hand knowledge, which is unconsciously integrated into our art. When monsters are written this way, they appear to have no limits, and I find that weirdly frustrating. Not to mention the worldbuilding pretzel I find hard to respect when the monster is actually custom-designed to be extra scary or good at killing/destroying humans, when they did not know about humans - it's just too much Ah How Convenient, Humans Are The Center of the Universe (Negative Edition) to me. I'd respect it more if a monster was like "oh I have discovered Humans are a great snack, didn't know they existed!" rather than some cosmically horrifying this has always been out there to hunt you, a Very Important Organism from the Center of the Universe* statement. I don't think these concerns bother other people who like the genre, or use these concepts, it's just me. They wake up every ounce of my but actuallyyyy instincts and then I stop enjoying it as a book**.
I'm OK with totally magical (often in fantasy) monsters, since it just says OK, ignore all physical realities, this is something else. That's fine. I just can't with the halfsies position here.
(Indeed I did not enjoy Blindsight [I believe this is Peter Watts' exercise in despair], nor Into the Drowning Deep, nor right now, Leviathan Wakes.)
*Pretty sure we're in a backwater actually
** Actually I also don't appreciate, this time from a narrative perspective, the way many of those also do a late-book shift into re-examining the horrifying bits as Actually This is Beautiful, which I find both twee and irritating. THIS IS JUST NOT FOR ME
no subject
Date: Feb. 16th, 2026 05:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: Feb. 16th, 2026 07:36 pm (UTC)Yes I often like alien aliens as a xenobiology thing but less as a metaphor for how humans are The Worst and will be hunted to extinction etc.
haha I know of some engineers that can't stand a lot of sf because they can't turn off the "but it doesn't work that way!!" instinct too. All what you are used to thinking about I think.
no subject
Date: Feb. 16th, 2026 06:36 pm (UTC)Joking aside, yes, I hear you, dragons are real but a different kind of real that has nothing to do with biology.
no subject
Date: Feb. 16th, 2026 06:44 pm (UTC)haha sometimes I think I'm just accustomed to fantasy tropes, but also fantasy doesn't require you to rationalize it, they just say here it is. And I'm more ok with that!
no subject
Date: Feb. 16th, 2026 06:51 pm (UTC)My problem with bio-horror specifically is that creatives will never invent a monster as terrifying as actual existing parasites, because fiction surpassing the evolutionary imperative to eat ALL the things is impossible.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
no subject
Date: Feb. 16th, 2026 07:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: Feb. 16th, 2026 08:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: Feb. 16th, 2026 08:42 pm (UTC)"I know that these tiny, almost invisible, hair-thin worms - 'the most numerous animals on earth' - are everywhere, hundreds in every handful of leaf mould, billions beneath the soil, recycling debris, remaking the world."
no subject
Date: Feb. 16th, 2026 07:28 pm (UTC)(Also, I absolutely HATE the "but the monsters were right all along!" ~~subversive~~ twists. No! If your entire ethical argument hinges around "but maybe some/certain categories/all of the humans are SUPPOSED to die, that's just how it is" - bzzzt! no! You have failed ethics! Go back and try again!)
no subject
Date: Feb. 16th, 2026 07:44 pm (UTC)> You can either have a plausible alien ecosystem, or you can have a creepy thing hunting humans on a spaceship. You don't get to have both!
This is about where I am with it too.
I'm not a fan of those twists either. Overall I don't really enjoy retcons that are that big, I think.