Making a long-vanished race interesting?

We've all read about ancient races, forgotten necropolises and doomsday weapons unlike anything in existence today. But many vanished-races share the same basic tropes, I want to do something different, but I'm not sure how. :/

The basic premise for for my race is that they are only known from a derelict spacecraft found on a long-dead moon near the Oort Cloud. The spacecraft has been dated to around 30,000 BC, long before any know race was capable of space flight. Based on pictographs found within the vessel, the race was vaugly humanoid, with two legs, four arms (with the shoulders sitting in tandem) each with three fingers, an oblong head with three eyes, two "horns" which curve back behind the head and a vertically-oriented mouth.

Anyone have any suggestions as to how I can make them and their culture interesting?

 

Is it vital for the story that they are humanoid? Because part of the intrigue could be the process of figuring out what they actually looked like from context clues rather than just a straight up pictograph. What height are the hallways, how are the buttons on the console arranged, how does life support work, all this basic archaeology stuff. If it is vital that they are humanoid, is it vital that the reader know this straight away?

Other than that, can I ask what role this civilization plays in the plot? Because making them interesting and not-tropey is one thing, but being relevant to proceedings is pretty damn important to.

 

By creating intrigue. You make people wonder. You manage to recover a database of logs, and your team tries to decode their language. However, the database is damaged, so they only manage to get bits and pieces of the information. Now your readers and characters are stuck asking questions. Who are they? Where did they come from? Are there others like them out there? Why did they crash/come to this moon? Are they hostile? Where did they all go?

And there you have it. Questions like that are more interesting than things like their choice in ship design or attires.

 

When you have read about possibly forgotten races and technology, what did you say to yourself? I am sure you had your own opinions of how things would have gone vs what you are being told. Explore those.

 

I guess humanoid wasn't really the right word to use, biped would have been better. None of the species in my story are human-like. They themselves do not play a huge role in the story (until book 2 that is), but their ship is the setting for the third act.

Ah ok! So keep everyone asking why, keep an air of mystery?

Well, I do have quite a few opinions. So you think I should explore my opinions and use my thoughts like "hmm, you know, I think it would have been better if X happened this way...".

 

Yes.

So many ship interiors have been written, talked about, and made for movies/tv. I am sure you have your own ideas about what it would be like. Often times when I encounter a ufo description (written or visual) I can only think about the trope where the interior is larger than the exterior. They just rarely seem big enough to do all the things they are supposed to be able to do.

 

Ugh that was always a peeve of mine, bigger on the inside. I want to avoid doing that, part of that section of the book will also be on the moon itself as well. As for the ship itself, what if...stay with me...what if the ship was organic? Grown rather than built, I wanna really make it alien, even in the context of the series.

 

There's a solid history of organic and hybrid spaceships. Farscape comes to mind as a well-known example. I believe the ship on that show wasn't just organic, it was sentient as well. It's an interesting avenue to take, where a ship isn't so much a vehicle as it is a symbiotic species.

 

What if the species who "flew" the ship were integral to the ship's health, sorta like what you said about symbiosis? Should I go a more plant-ship or animal-ship route?

 

I think the interest lies in the relationship between the species. Is one domesticated and/or by the other, is it true symbiosis, coercion, is the ship sentient, are the passengers, etc? What if the presumed "ship" is actually the sentient space traveler and the presumed "passengers" are just non-sentient parasites, like mites or lice? And the characters just assume these parasites are the sentient species because that's how we've all been told spacefaring races operate? That sort of thing.

 

Yes. The mystery keeps it interesting as you slowly unravel each question.

 

This. This is good advice. It's not a bad move to let the reader's imagination do a bit of legwork. For me, one of the more memorable Ancient Aliens of Sci-Fi are the so-called Builders from Hyperion Cantos. They're memorable precisely because almost nothing is known about them, except that they left behind some big-ass tunnels. Lots of juicy blank spaces for the mind to fill in. Maybe that's just me; it's possible that I'm not wired in an entirely orthodox fashion. You wouldn't have to go for something that minimalistic, of course. You could spread tidbits of information out across the story, like a trail of breadcrumbs. I know that I, for one, love collecting jigsaws in this way and arranging them into 1/16th of a complete picture. And now I'll shut up before my metaphors (or are they similies? I need education on this point) get out of hand.

I'll revisit this thread when and if I've formulated some more concrete advice on how to make an interesting alien race that's not all smoke and mirrors. Best of luck.

 

I remember a scene from Star Trek where they boarded an alien vessel without knowing what they were getting into, and appropos nothing Bones (I believe) said, "Well, we know they're bipedal." How? "Ladders."

You could think of similar ways people could ascertain things about the aliens just by the construction of their ship. Say you come across a borg charging alcove - what could that be for, just from visual inspection? What could aliens figure out about us from looking at the ISS?

I have a race of long-gone aliens who're remembered almost as gods by a people who they abducted and heavily experimented on. These people have a mangled version of their language and revere nebulae and the wind, because apparently these are things that're reminiscent of the aliens. It's implied that they could move through space without ships, in part by the fact that none of their ships are ever found - nor are any ruins of whatever civilization they had.

All they really left behind are their experiments, are it's been so many generations that most of those people don't even care about them anymore - the 'religion' is a fringe one. The oldest known spacefaring species in the universe doesn't even know any more about them than anyone else.

Basically my strategy is to give almost nothing. To be fair, they also don't figure into the plot in a real way. A recurring theme in the overall story is the cyclical nature of societies - the current one is on the downswing for most of the plot - and these guys are sort of an example of a past one. So I can get away with giving pretty much nothing away.

If it's possible, though, I'd still recommend giving away as little as you can. Doesn't mean you shouldn't know - but the more you can let the reader's imagination fill in, the better. Prometheans were way cooler when they were space jockeys.

 

Ah ok! One idea I had was that the moon wouldn't actually be barren, as was though, but was in fact full of life. And one of those life forms would turn out the be the degraded descendants of the spacefairers.

Awesome! I will be sure not to unravel the questions too quickly.

Ya, I liked 'em better as fossized elephant-like creatures rather than as white hairless humans.

I want to avoid doing the "decaying society" trope. After all, there's nothing to say that the species is completely gone. For all we know, they could have a thriving civilization somewhere in the unexplored regions of the Milky Way. For all the characters know, this was just an alien tugboat.

 

To do something different, you could use history as an inspiration:
The Rosetta Stone is a granodiorite stele, found in 1799, inscribed with three versions of a decree issued at Memphis, Egypt in 196 BC during the Ptolemaic dynasty on behalf of King Ptolemy V. The top and middle texts are in Ancient Egyptian using hieroglyphic script and Demotic script, respectively, while the bottom is in Ancient Greek. As the decree has only minor differences between the three versions, the Rosetta Stone proved to be the key to deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs.
What if remnants of the species have been discovered but no one could understand anything they wrote or recorded? Then, hidden in your Oort Cloud is the rosetta stone to understanding them? That way the species would already be known if still very mysterious. Your protagonists will have a wonder about the species and then a very real sense of discovery as they unlock the mystery.

 

If in doubt, look to human history itself. There are thousands of cultures each with their unique traits and customs. Mixing and matching some of them to pair with the vision you have for these aliens tends to give a feeling unique to the civilization you wish to achieve. I suppose the easiest way to start off is to get thinking about anatomy. Specially the anatomy of your alien. What would extra arms entail? What foods would they eat with their vertical mouths? What purpose would horns serve in their society (More of a biology question than a social question, really)? Getting into the mindset of thinking deeper questions about your world coming up with arbitrary answers helps to fill in the holes it might have.

 

I think you're getting tied up in the fine details. To make such a people interesting you need to give them the air of humanity to them. Make them assholes. Look at the Roman Empire and Ptolomeic Egypt. Make the rulers (who write the history) depraved madmen who married their sisters and fiddled as Rome burned. That's how you make them interesting. By making them feel like a genuine ancient race. Give them slaves, give them incest and orgies and gladiators and all manner of fucked up stuff. Make them into depraved, degenerate fucks that no-one wants to be anywhere near.

 

Cold for life as we define it. Heck, Earth wasn't even considered to be Life-sustainable until the 2080's, due to its toxin-choked atmosphere. (even then, contact with Earth was accidental.) No moons though? Oh dear... I may have to find a work-a-round for that.

Interesting idea!!

So, do some world-building? I try and be carful with using human history, as I wasn't to avoid the "Jews in Space" trope. Where alien cultures are just taken from pre-existing human cultures, like Roman, Mongolian, Jewish, Chinese etc. One species, not this long-forgotten one, saw a radical shift from a previously pacifistic society to a warrior society.

As for this long-forgotten species, the "horns" were more like protrusions used to anchor muscles that would work the jaws, which, due to not being attached to the cranium, can protrude outwards in a similar manner to the jaws of sharks. An idea I had was that these guys were rather large, 15' at the shoulder, and the "rear" set of arms were often used to support their torso, functioning like a second set of legs. This kind of co-opted limb use is common in evolution. Our own feet originated as firm walking platforms, were modified to function as hands, and then were re-molded again into walking platforms when we left the forest and became plains-runners.

Dang... o.0

Ok then, I will remember that. "Degenerate fucks", got it. Not sure how self-fertilizing hermephodites can have incest though...

 

My first question is what is it doing here and how did it get stranded? Even if an interstellar ship died in space, the odds of it getting stuck in the Oort cloud by chance are slim to null. They must have been observing something going on around our star, probably our ancestors? Then what happened to them? How did the ship break down, what happened on the ship during the last hours or days, and why did nobody come to retrieve the ship?

 

Well, I'm not going to answer those questions here, you will just have to read the story and find out!