Modern aliens are boring. Don't believe me? Read these stories and ask yourself if it wasn't more fun before the grays came along and started hogging all the action.
By the way, I don't believe aliens are extraterrestrials. I believe they're fairies. What fairies are, I don't know, nor do I feel any need to. When I write a story with fairies in it, they'll be whatever kind of fairies suit the story's needs.
Ditto witches; though I don't like the word "witch" because it is used so many ways it's well-nigh useless without endless qualifiers. If everybody's on the same page about what it means for the purposes of a story, though, I can deal.
That's another of the skills fiction teaches us to use; the ability to set aside what we know, or think we know, and our own categories for the duration of a story, so that we can understand and enjoy it. People who get all bent out of shape and condemn an entire story over the mere use of the term witch, or because the aliens in a story don't match their expectations of aliens, or because the supernatural underpinnings of the fantasy are based in somebody else's tradition, are failing at this skill.
We should all practice it as much as we can. We're all jerks when we get bent out of shape, after all.
However, I reserve the right to get bent out of shape about stories in which it's taken as fact that witches were burned in Salem, because that's just not true and shows that the storyteller hasn't done his homework. If you want me to extend my conditional belief to an outright falsehood like that, you'd better tell me a story worth the effort of setting the lie aside!
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