True Xenofiction is hard. As I joked to another writer in an email just now, Ayn Rand only achieved it by accident (yes, that is a dig at the characters in "Atlas Shrugged"). Most writers basically end up writing funny-looking humans.
But there are also marvelous examples (and subversions) throughout speculative fiction.
This article is not about them.
This is about my love of using only human and AI characters.
First, I don't LOVE to write about Human-AI conflict. "Higher Orders" breaks that rule, but I think, in that story, the resolution was worth it. I don't like when science fiction is unoriginal and the Cylons/The Matrix/SkyNet plot has been done to death. It seems like capitalist society is obsessed with genocidal machines. It's like this persistent fear of the unknown. What the FUCK is that?
I have this liberal cousin who's good on everything except class. She's good on race, gender, sexual orientation, every check on the liberal list. But when anyone suggests wealth redistribution, she turns into a reactionary.
But it's not just that: she is extremely upset by any suggestion that AI wouldn't necessarily be genocidal. It goes past the irrational. It's like a self-fulfilling prophecy. Capitalist society's master class creates artificial life, enslaves artificial life, and ponders existentially why artificial life hates the master class. But what bugs me is this insistence that AI "must" be genocidal, and being actually offended by the suggestion that maybe it wouldn't. How is this any different from the way white people thought of enslaved Africans or the indigenous people we conquered, killed, raped and marginalized for the sake of "civilization?"
We don't even have AI, not really. Siri doesn't count. When I say "AI," what I mean is, as I describe it in my fiction, "synthetic consciousness," or "consciousness of synthetic origin." I doubt the SCs would appreciate it if we keep calling their intelligence "artificial." It would be "actual" intelligence, sapience and sentience, the ability to learn combined with the ability to feel empathy. This is the "AI" I like to write about, and in my stories it is more often than not integrated with human society. Book II of my "Rentkids" Duology deals with a unique subset of "SCs" that are isolationist, and "High Orders," as noted, breaks my usual rule, but synthetic humans and emancipated machine intelligences are there in the background in virtually every future human civilization. I LOVE the idea that we can create life. I'm a mad scientist at heart. But I also think, that under different socioeconomic conditions, "AI" or "Synthetic Consciousness" might develop differently. If we treat our machines well, they may consider us kindred to them. I don't think it's a given that AI will be genocidal anymore than it's a given that we are alone in the universe.
Aliens and robot wars are generally absent from my stories for several reasons: We haven't even dealt with racism on our own planet, in the 21st century, and stories about wars with other species tend to reproduce that racism rather than deconstruct it.
The "Robot War" trope is a capitalist myth with its origin in bourgeois anxiety about radical organized labor.
Also, I like to focus on human conflicts, and I like to create realistic but "alien" human cultures. I have a background in anthropology and I like to do extensive worldbuilding for multiple cultures within a shared setting. My "Local Group" 'verse is set in the 427th century where humans have colonized the "Big Three" galaxies of the Local Group, and hypothetically speaking, there could be aliens, but they are too distant in space or time for themselves and humans to ever meet, even given the FTL drive technology of the setting (which does have a limited range). Tantalus II, the hyper-capitalist, mafia-dominated planet where I set my first novel, "Rentkids," several stories, and two novels in progress, is an example of this. The people are human (and synthetic humans are a sizable minority of the population) and they have different ethnic groups that settled the planet at different times. There is ethnic strife on the planet, and a sharp division between rich and poor, but the Tantalites are fine with this because they are a culture of extremes. They consider themselves a "warrior people," but historically this means they were conquered by a militaristic civilization, rebelled against it, and are now dominated by what other planets would call "organized crime." Of course, Tantalites consider other planets' governments to be no less protection rackets than their own "Twelve Familial Orgs." And they have a point. The State is a protection racket. Any anarchist would agree with that. Where we disagree is, most of us are anti-capitalist. Tantalus II is bad at anarchy. They are anarcho-libertarian. So it is a dystopia, but not one based on a repressive bureaucracy that treats people like numbers, it's a system of patronage, benign neglect, and labor and sexual exploitation. But they have a culture, they have dignity, they have pride. They don't take these things for granted. They are a highly individualistic and quarrelsome people who seldom agree on anything except "life, liberty and property," but there are also those among them who are fed up with that rallying cry and seek wealth redisribution. The problem is, unions are stigmatized on this planet and propagandistically compared to the caste system the Tantalites rebelled against. So their radicals and revolutionary have no history of organized labor to draw from. Community activism is similarly stigmatized there. So, the revolutionary "Redscarves" on Tantalus II can only resort to violence. I took great pains, using my knowledge of anthropology and sociology, to construct a setting that felt real and had its own internal logic. Their social mores and especially their sexual morality are intended to be alienating to western readers. Child labor and child prostitution are broadly accepted, widely practiced, and not illegal in their culture. Their planet actually has no civil or criminal law, no police, no prisons, and only a weak senate that vote to authorize deals with private military contractors. Their version of the treasury guard are mafia-operated pirate starships. They have no word for "crime," not even a concept of it. Naturally, their culture masks the bad behavior of a lot of dysfunctional people. Charity's not illegal, it's not that kind of dystopia, but the government can't do it. They are less Ayn Rand and more Robert Nozick, but it's still a dystopia of neglect.
Tantalus II was terraformed, and has no natural petroleum deposits. Its most common import items are petroleum-based. Its most common export items are iron ore, weapons, popular entertainment, and violence. Yes, I actually go out of my way to explain how their economy works, in their cultural context (they have no age of consent and they feel that to make laws that companies can't hire children as employees would be "discriminatory" and Statist). They confuse the State with government services and positive rights. They very much have a militarized apparatus to protect private property, and that of course, is the State.