Timeline for Who was the first alien "person" or "man"?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
20 events
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| Feb 26, 2016 at 17:23 | comment | added | Hypnosifl | I doubt it'd lead to controversy, Lucian of Samosata's 2nd century story from my answer is identified by a number of sources as the first story to feature aliens, and plugging the side-by-side translation here into google translate, it looks like the word they translate as "men" is the Greek ἄνδρες which in the latin alphabet is rendered as ándres, I don't think there's really any ambiguity about the translation of that word (it's the root of words like android and androgen). But if you want to keep it to English works anyway, no problem. | |
| Feb 26, 2016 at 17:08 | comment | added | ThePopMachine | @Hypnosifl: I don't know if we can always unambiguously translate foreign words directly into "person" or "man" or that the connotations would be the same, so that doesn't seem like a productive line of questioning. (It's going to cause more debates than answers.) But, I don't see why existing translations into English wouldn't be fair game. | |
| Feb 26, 2016 at 17:01 | comment | added | Hypnosifl | Could you clarify if you're looking specifically for English works (and if so does it include English translations of works originally written in another language), or if any language will do as long as it uses a word generally translated as equivalent to "person" or "man"? | |
| Feb 26, 2016 at 4:30 | answer | added | user14111 | timeline score: 0 | |
| Feb 25, 2016 at 18:37 | comment | added | ThePopMachine | @Mithrandir: If you're wondering why I reverted the title, it's because of this: (1) A title is a title, not the full question. The text is to explain and clarify the detailed question. We shouldn't go on a mission to make every title as full and complete as possible. It's better for a title to be short and possibly even "have a hook" than to worry about the exact letter of the words. (2) Even if you don't agree with that, the quotations marks around "person" and "man" already indicate that the question is about a reference. That makes the addition of referred to as redundant. | |
| Feb 25, 2016 at 17:17 | history | rollback | ThePopMachine |
Rollback to Revision 3
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| Feb 25, 2016 at 16:25 | history | edited | Mithical | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Feb 25, 2016 at 16:19 | answer | added | Hypnosifl | timeline score: 2 | |
| Feb 25, 2016 at 15:26 | history | edited | ThePopMachine | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
added 210 characters in body; edited title
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| Feb 25, 2016 at 15:24 | comment | added | ThePopMachine | In light of all the commentary and answers, I'm going to expand the question to include man in the old-fashioned generic sense. | |
| Feb 25, 2016 at 15:15 | comment | added | ImaginaryEvents | In modern science fiction, the watershed depiction of aliens was Stanley Weinbaum's "A Martian Odyssey" (1934). The Wikipedia article:says "[The martian] Tweel itself was one of the first characters (arguably the first) who satisfied John W. Campbell's famous challenge: "Write me a creature who thinks as well as a man, or better than a man, but not like a man." From the story: "I'd be a goner anyway when the sun set, but I couldn't explain that to him. I said, 'Thanks, Tweel. You're a man!' and felt that I wasn't paying him any compliment at all. A man! There are mighty few men who'd do that." | |
| Feb 25, 2016 at 14:54 | comment | added | user14111 | I'm afraid the answer to your question is the boring one, that space aliens have always been referred to as people, as long as people have been writing about space aliens. | |
| Feb 25, 2016 at 12:42 | answer | added | user14111 | timeline score: 1 | |
| Feb 25, 2016 at 10:15 | comment | added | user14111 | From the online OED entry for person, sense 5: " In general philosophical sense: a conscious or rational being." Not the earliest but maybe the clearest citation is from John Locke in 1694: "We must consider what Person stands for; which, I think, is a thinking, intelligent Being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider it self as it self." No explicit mention of space aliens, but it seems clear that the definition would apply to an intelligent ET. | |
| Feb 25, 2016 at 7:37 | comment | added | January First-of-May | Much of the classic sci-fi was not in English, which translation to use? How non-human - do the (alien) main characters of Micromegas count? I'm pretty sure someone will find something in the Houyhnhnm chapter of Gulliver's Travels, but I don't have time to check right now. | |
| Feb 25, 2016 at 7:22 | answer | added | user14111 | timeline score: 4 | |
| Feb 25, 2016 at 7:07 | history | edited | ThePopMachine | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Feb 25, 2016 at 7:07 | comment | added | ThePopMachine | @Hypnosifl, I will accept that as an inciteful answer to the gist of the question. But someone can still offer an answer to the literal question. | |
| Feb 25, 2016 at 6:43 | comment | added | Hypnosifl | Older writers probably would have been more likely to use "men" or "man" rather than "person" or "people", do you count that? Here's a fairly early example from Lovecraft's "At the Mountains of Madness" (1936): "poor Old Ones! Scientists to the last - what had they done that we would not have done in their place? God, what intelligence and persistence! What a facing of the incredible, just as those carven kinsmen and forbears had faced things only a little less incredible! Radiates, vegetables, monstrosities, star spawn - whatever they had been, they were men!" | |
| Feb 25, 2016 at 6:34 | history | asked | ThePopMachine | CC BY-SA 3.0 |