Stanislaw Lem treated the theme of ungraspable aliens with some success; “Solaris” is better-known, but “Eden” is even more striking in its exploration of the failure to understand.
The remark about the “Star Trek” episode seems strangely inept; surely the writers weren’t concerned about the plausibility of the identical parallel evolution—it was just a literary device for them. Criticizing that as a failure to imagine divergent evolution is a bit like criticizing a soap opera for using the twin device to keep an actor after the character dies; after all, the writers could have refrained from doing that, and instead put in a new different character with a different actor...
Stanislaw Lem treated the theme of ungraspable aliens with some success; “Solaris” is better-known, but “Eden” is even more striking in its exploration of the failure to understand.
The remark about the “Star Trek” episode seems strangely inept; surely the writers weren’t concerned about the plausibility of the identical parallel evolution—it was just a literary device for them. Criticizing that as a failure to imagine divergent evolution is a bit like criticizing a soap opera for using the twin device to keep an actor after the character dies; after all, the writers could have refrained from doing that, and instead put in a new different character with a different actor...