: Re: Is accurate human nature required for good writing, even in fantasy scenarios, or with fictional species? I don't know if this is something that is established in the discipline of literature.

@Annie587

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I agree with you, but with a qualifier.

I often read science fiction stories where humans in the future are fundamentally different from people today. The story will say how in the future people no longer fight wars or commit violent crimes because humanity has "matured" or "evolved", the people are all more intelligent, they are more rational, etc. I find this very implausible. People today are not particularly different from people hundreds or thousands of years ago. Read some very old book -- ancient Greek plays or the Bible, for example. (And when I mention the Bible, for present purposes ignore the religious content, just think about how the people behave.) What were the motives of people in ancient times? At their worst they wanted sex and money and power. At their best they wanted love and honor. Take any of these ancient stories and re-tell it in a modern setting. Would the behavior of the people seem at all peculiar? To pick one well-known Bible story off the top of my head, consider David and Bathsheba. A man gets an accidental view of a woman naked in her bath and instantly wants her. They are both married, but he approaches her and they have an affair. She gets pregnant. He is rich and powerful and so he arranges for her husband, who is a soldier, to be sent on a dangerous mission where, as he hoped, the man is killed. Certainly a dramatic and extreme story, but if you set that in 21st century America, would anyone find the behavior of the characters implausible?

I've read plenty of stories where I've found myself saying, "Oh come on, why would he do THAT? It doesn't even occur to him to be suspicious?" or "Yeah, I get that peole can panic in an extreme situation, but would anyone really be THAT stupid?" etc.

My caveat is this: We expect the hero, and often the villain, to be extreme. The hero or heroine may be much more brave or smart or sexy or whatever than any real person. I don't want to read a story about a guy who goes to work in an office every day, sits at a computer filling out forms, and then goes home, eats dinner, and goes to sleep. I want to read about bold adventurers, clever spies, sexy seductresses, etc.

With non-human races, I expect them to be different from humans in some way. Well, by definition they must be different in SOME way, but this could well include their behavior. There are lots of lazy stories where the dwarves or aliens or whatever just take some human characteristic and exaggerate it. How many non-humans in fiction are extremely war-like? Or extremely conformist? These are ideas that were not very interesting to begin with and that have been beaten to death.

I read a story once where the writer said that while humans primarily think in terms of "right and wrong", the aliens think in terms of "respectable and not-respectable". It was an interesting attempt to make a truly alien alien. In my humble opinion he never explained it well or explored the implications, but it was a good try.

I once came across the "writer's guide" for the original Star Trek series. They had what I considered an excellent little exercise in there. They described 3 brief scenes, and asked which had the biggest problems. One referred to the ship as "United States Ship Enterprise". Yes that's wrong, they said, but a trivial error that can be fixed by changing one word. Another described some futuristic weapon, and they said, sure, the description of the weapon appears to violate known laws of physics, but we don't care, and we don't want writers to be pre-occupied with gadgets. The third described a teaser scene where the Enterprise is attacked, and it concludes with Captain Kirk putting his arm around Yeoman Rand "as they wait for certain death". This, they said, was wildly implausible. Move the setting to a 20th century US Navy ship. They are attacked and expect to all be killed. Would the captain of the ship put his arm around a female officer and hug her as they prepared to die? Very unlikely.

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