If I remember correctly, LeGuin wrote about a Clarion workshop where she asked her students to write stories with aliens, and all the stories were comic. So she asked them to write stories about dying aliens. This was an introduction to a story about an alien whose culture uses mazes as a basic tool of communication.
Human scientists capture it and put it in a maze. The alien is distressed and bewildered because the maze doesn’t make sense and the humans don’t respond to any of the alien’s efforts at communication. The alien eventually dies, though I don’t remember how much this is of misery and how much that the physical conditions are wrong for it.
If I remember correctly, LeGuin wrote about a Clarion workshop where she asked her students to write stories with aliens, and all the stories were comic. So she asked them to write stories about dying aliens. This was an introduction to a story about an alien whose culture uses mazes as a basic tool of communication.
Human scientists capture it and put it in a maze. The alien is distressed and bewildered because the maze doesn’t make sense and the humans don’t respond to any of the alien’s efforts at communication. The alien eventually dies, though I don’t remember how much this is of misery and how much that the physical conditions are wrong for it.