Reading Benford's article got me thinking about this particular topic of interest. Benford writes that fundamentally, science fiction is about the alien, the experience of the totally foreign and unknown. He even calls out the humanistic view specifically, claiming that the human condition shouldn't be applied to something that's supposedly alien.
Now, a common theme in science fiction is invasion by extraterrestrial aliens. This was probably first done in The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells, and has become a popular plotline since. In the 50s aliens were often depicted as slender, hairless, emotionless beings, supremely powerful but as unsympathetic to humans as humans are to dust mites. The stereotypical alien story is that a person is abducted into a UFO, where the aliens proceed to prod, poke, and probe at them before putting them back. Basically they were more or less xenobiologists doing field work.
Otherwise, aliens would be depicted as conquerors, overwhelming mankind with their superior technology, not too different from the European conquest of the Americas, but with the same unfeeling disregard for the species.
However, more recently there have been depictions of less civilized alien creatures. In the film Predator the aliens are technologically advanced but more culturally primitive from a human perspective, hunting for sport and even taking trophies. In Alien, the creatures aren't sapient at all, being highly aggressive animals that seem little more than biological killing machines.
What do you think may have caused more aliens to be depicted as more savage or animalistic, as opposed to the older image of powerful but unfeeling beings?
Does this make them less human-like and therefore closer to the condition of "alien" that Benford describes?
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