Aliens in Science Fiction

Naturally enough, there are also Aliens in Science Fiction, which in the present time is more likely to be where you first heard of them than the climax of Exodus is, and further to that, there are nonfiction books about aliens that are bigger, longer, and heavier than the novels themselves. Books about movies are all filed together with books about dice games on hexagonal grids played with artificial intelligence style painted card decks, in the section that used to be about photography. 787-791 is an entire bookcase, front and back, full of modernist literature, which is far less a matter of nonfiction than it is of stills extracted from films and collections of fangoria. The AD&D volumes are in the same isle as the books on athletic track and field, but they have their own numbered filing category.

Strictly speaking, in terms of letters and original source origin in literature, the difference between an ancient alien, whose first mention is in the Bible, and a modernist or science fiction alien, including the mystery aliens on the History Channel, is that an ancient alien as described in the bible is a descendent of the tower builders of Ur/Babylon/the Chaldees on Shinar Plain, and a modernist science fiction alien originated in outer space, somewhere other than from ancestry on the surface of the earth.