Greens

In the background of a single panel of a Dan Dare comic strip, a bald, green-skinned Treen wearing a business suit and a bowler hat sits in a London bus, reading a newspaper - a Venerian immigrant to Earth, exactly paralleling the Merseian immigrants to the human colony planet, Dennitza, in Poul Anderson's A Knight Of Ghosts And Shadows. We hope that this Treen is not a covert Mekon loyalist - and also that none of his fellow passengers are anti-green racists.

We escape from reality into fiction but fiction reflects reality. There are two acts of the imagination here:

first, imagining hostile green extraterrestrials;

secondly, imagining plausible relationships with such extraterrestrials in peace as well as in war.

Anderson's Dominic Flandry series began as space opera, requiring only a standardized collective villain, then became part of an extended reflection on social change, requiring a more sophisticated treatment of several civilized races. Needless to say, Anderson did this second job more effectively than Dan Dare's script writers.

Sf writers have had to move out of the Solar System. CS Lewis' sinless, green-skinned human beings are, like the Treens, Venerians whereas James Blish's sinless, giant reptiles are, like the Merseians, extrasolar.