OFF: Solaris

[Guido Vacano]

I think Piers Anthony has visited this territory (crazy alien sex and
the attendant psychology) in his _Cluster_ series (perhaps elsewhere
too). Italo Calvino's _Cosmicomics_ comes close too, in some ways.

Guido

M Holmes wrote:

>Guido Vacano writes:
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>>Erm, do molecular biologists qualify? :-) Even if your question is
>>rooted in more "traditional" biology, I might be able to help.
>>
>>
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>OK, a game open to all anyway.
>
>The idea was to set a story on a planet of aliens who were in some way
>actually alien rather than just eggheaded or brutish humans. The
>difficulty is of course how to set a narrative where some of the
>characters can't be understood by the reader. My solution was to have a
>human protagonist who is a detective, be called in to solve a murder on
>the alien planet. He'd be unable to understand the alien thinking, but
>would be able, in a Holmesian way, to work it out, and thus solve the
>murder.
>
>Which is where biology, and evolutionary psychology come in.  Humans
>have male sexual jealousy, according to the evolutionary psychologists,
>because the plumbing and methodology of mating means that males can't be
>certain of paternity, and thus might waste considerable resources
>raising a child not genetically theirs (human cuckoldry rate seems to be
>running at 15% to 25% though cheap DNA tests might well change this).
>The incest taboo comes from the dangers of double-recessive genes,
>difficulties of sexual behaviour between siblings when child-rearing and
>other problems which need to be circumvented.  So the basic idea of
>evolutionary psychology is that emotions develop from some
>economic/logistic problem in the organism's environment or life cycle.
>
>So what I need is some peculiar breeding cycle of some organism which
>could be logically extrapolated through similar reasoning into an
>emotion in a sentient being which would be peculiar to understand but
>which could be rationally arrived at by examining the life cyycle or
>evolutionary history of the organism. It'd of course help if there were
>some logical reason to keep it secret from others or other species (our
>protagonism) a la incest and if it were clearly to be strong enough to
>be a motive for murder.
>
>Over to you....
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>FoFP
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