"It wasn't supposed to be like this, damn it! All three of our species have empathy, we have sympathy, we have a sense of fairness - the Babyeaters even tell stories like we do, they have art. Shouldn't that be enough? Wasn't that supposed to be enough? But all it does is put us into enough of the same reference frame that we can be horrible by each others' standards."

That's brilliant. Can I use this quote in a sci-fi alien story I'm writing, if I ever finish and publish it?

The reason I love it so much is because I've been thinking something similar about my alien species over the past few days. I was thinking to myself, "Hold on, aren't they a little TOO similar to humans?" Then I realized that if I want them to have meaningful clashes of culture and values and morals (which is part of the point of my writing it), then they need to be similar enough to be measuring each other from the same reference frame. If I make them too different then they'll be so incomprehensible to each other that they won't have any basis for comparison. And what you said in that paragraph basically summed that up much more eloquently than I ever could. (I find that the vast majority of what I want to communicate has already been said much better by someone else.) To borrow your phrasing, my aliens and humans need to be in "enough of the same reference frame that [they] can be horrible by each others' standards."

So, I'm wondering if I can use that quote at the beginning of a chapter or "part" or something. With credit to you, of course. :)

(And that's assuming that it ever gets finished, let alone published.)

I'm a newcomer, by the way. Hello everyone.