Humans on the whole tend to be xenophobic, alas. It’s not just differences in language or culture that we stigmatize; those are superficial. Can be tolerated, or changed if necessary. What we seem to hate extravagantly and irrationally are small differences in appearance; the wrong skin color, the wrong facial features… It’s as if anyone different from us is an alien, to be ostracized, subjugated, expelled, or drummed out of existence. This would go double for any visitors from other star systems, as many science fiction authors have predicted.
It follows that any interstellar visitors not lucky enough to look human might elect to adopt a form indistinguishable from human, the better to blend in on Earth.
Perhaps examples would help—here are five:
The Man Who Fell to Earth by Walter Tevis (1963)
Anthea has highly developed technology but (thanks to some very poor decisions) almost no resources. Its population has dwindled until there are only three hundred surviving Antheans.
Earth, on the contrary, has an abundance of resources. Not that this would do Anthea any good, because:
- Earth lacks the ability to export its resources.
- Earth doesn’t know that Anthea exists at all.
Anthea is doomed, unless some ingenious way can be found to put Terrestrial resources at Anthean disposal.
The meager Anthean resources are sufficient to deliver one Anthean disguised as a human to Earth. Adopting the name Thomas Jerome Newton, his task is to parlay Anthean technological innovations into a fortune, which can then be used to finance Anthea’s salvation, quite possibly bringing global peace and prosperity to Earth as a side-effect. A worthy plan with only two flaws: Newton’s weakness for American vices and America’s profoundly paranoid security state.
As you know, The Man Who Fell to Earth was adapted to film, as were Tevis’ The Hustler and The Color of Money, while The Queen’s Gambit was adapted to television. The Hustler and The Color of Money are explicitly connected, while nothing in The Queen’s Gambit rules out it being in the same narrative universe. Do all four adaptations share the same continuity? Nobody in Hustler, Color, or Queen’s Gambit says they are Anthean, which is exactly what we would expect if they were undercover aliens…
The Far Side of Evil by Sylvia Louise Engdahl (1971)
Planetary civilizations that develop space flight survive and thrive. Those that do not perish. The Federation is curious as to why some planets choose one path while others choose the other. The planet Toris, poised on the brink of choosing between maturity or doom, is a rare chance to observe the so-called critical stage.
Rather conveniently for the Federation, Toris’ natives are sufficiently humanoid that it’s trivial to disguise field agents Elana and Randil as locals before planting them as observers amongst the unsuspecting Torisians. Less conveniently for both Toris and the Federation, Randil is convinced that he can save Toris from itself—a direct contravention of Federation rules. In fact, Randil may be the catalyst for planetary doom.
What the heck is it about science fictional Federations and rogue field agents?
This is something of an inversion of the aliens-among-us trope. Technically, this is humans amongst aliens. Engdahl’s universe appears to produce a curious abundance of essentially human aliens, while Toris is suspiciously similar to Cold War-era Earth, as seen from an American perspective.
Ingathering by Zenna Henderson (1995)
Forced to flee their doomed home world, a shipload of People reached the Earth in the late 19th century. The catastrophic landing scattered survivors across the American Southwest. Enough People survived to ensure the continuation of the People…at least for the moment.
Visually indistinguishable from Terrestrials, the People differ in very important respects. Humans developed technology. The People have psionic powers. Humans are often violent. The People are not. Therefore, when possible, the People live apart, in isolated communities. That this is not always possible, that the charade may someday fail, is a concern for the People, because on Earth “different is dead.”
Despite the gloomy tone of the above, the People stories often have happy endings. However, reaching them requires a lot of work.
The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya by Nagaru Tanigawa (2003)
Young Haruhi had a horrifying revelation. She is only one insignificant human among billions of insignificant humans. Outraged at the injustice, Haruhi set out to pursue wonders. If time-travelers, sliders (people from alternate universes), psychic adepts, or aliens are on Earth, Haruhi’s SOS Brigade1 will find them.
Haruhi would be astonished to learn that of the SOS’s members (Mikuru Asahina, Itsuki Koizumi, Yuki Nagato, Kyon, and Haruhi herself), only Kyon is a mundane human. Mikuru is a time-traveler, Itsuki is an esper, and Yuki is the humanoid manifestation of the incomprehensibly alien Data Integration Thought Entity. As for Haruhi? She may well be a god whose whimsy could imperil existence, a being who warrants close monitoring.
A good part of the series’ arc involves Haruhi learning to be a better or at least less-bad person (or a better whatever the hell she is, something for which Mikuru, Itsuki, and Yuki lack consensus beyond “extremely dangerous”). This is the first novel in a series, which means that base-state Haruhi is comprehensively lacking in basic virtues such as kindness and empathy. She learns to be better as the series proceeds… albeit from a very low starting point.
Nyaruko: Crawling with Love! by Manta Aisora and illustrated by Koin (2009)
Earth! The universe’s only source of thionite delectable humans and delectable human products such as anime! Purloining humans and human creations for sale elsewhere in the galaxy is forbidden (or at least, regulated). Humans being unable to defend themselves, stalwart officers like Nyaruko must protect them. More specifically, Nyaruko must protect Japanese student Mahiro Yasaka.
Better known on Earth as Nyarlothotep, Nyaruko’s default form is an eldritch abomination, the smallest glimpse of which would surely drive all humans within eyeshot insane. Not ideal for undercover work. Happily, among her available forms is that of a silver-haired high-school girl—a perfect choice for infiltrating Earth before inadvertently unleashing chaos.
Readers may be surprised that there is a light novel series (and various adaptations thereof) in which a major character is a sympathetically portrayed Lovecraftian horror. These readers may be interested to learn that the Lovecraftian horror tabletop roleplaying game Call of Cthulhu is wildly popular in Japan… and also that there is at least one other work featuring a sympathetically portrayed Lovecraftian horror: Pochi Iida’s The Elder Sister-like One, in which Shub-Niggurath embraces the role of doting older sister to a forsaken orphan.
There are many tales in which aliens pass themselves off as human (or humans as alien)2. These are but a very few. This is usually where I encourage readers to mention other examples below: Please do!
However, I also would appreciate it if some reader could identify a book I bought from Scholastic in Grade 5 (so 1971–1972), which featured an alien boy able to pass as human because human minds refused to accept his manifest alienness and saw him as a normal boy. It isn’t Alan Mendelsohn, the Boy from Mars, because that wasn’t published until 1979. Any idea what it was?