tall;
bipedal;
green-furred;
four-armed;
golden-eyed.
Maybe they stood still with closed eyes and were mistaken for trees?
They resemble ERB's green Martians with a touch of Bradbury's "Dark They Were And Golden-Eyed." They also use six-legged "ponies" (Chapter VI, p. 41) which, especially if they are also green, resemble ERB's thoats and Anderson's stathas.
Maybe animal species proliferate between timelines?
9 comments:
Paul:
"Maybe they stood still with closed eyes and were mistaken for trees?"
Everybody's a comic. But "...it was not initially recognized that there were intelligent inhabitants." They simply didn't show any behavior that the explorers recognized as signs of intelligence.
They were probably texting.
Which, let me emphasize, is something very UNLIKE blogging.
David,
I hope so!
Paul.
If you're looking to indicate an alien evolutionary history, throwing in an extra pair of limbs is as good as anything.
Humans (and vertebrates in general) happen to have four limbs because that happened to be the fin arrangement of our ancestral fish.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
And I think we can expect evolution on other worlds to follow roughly analogous lines. I will expect some species to have six limbs, four for walking and moving around, and two for grasping and manipulating tools and weapons. In fact, high gravity worlds might favor that, because four limbs could carry more weight more easily than can two. Like Anderson's Wodenites.
Sean
He did that in "Call Me Joe", too. Centauroids are a logical development. They couldn't start as arboreal, the way we did, though.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
And "Call Me Joe" is a good example of artificial centauroids being created by humans to which they would somehow download their personalities. I need to reread that daring story!
And centauroids would be far too big and heavy to ever have been arboreal!
Sean
As I recall, there were native centauroids on Jupiter in "Call Me Joe", as well.
You could get an arboreal centauroid, but it would have to be smaller and have gripping appendages on all its limbs.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
I WILL soon reread "Call Me Joe." I would have sworn the only living things on Jupiter were the artificial lifeforms they created.
I dunno about arboreal centauroids. It seems needlessly complex!
Sean
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