My writing is heavily influenced by the Sci Fi masters of the 40's, 50's and 60's. Then there is Vonnegut. So, yes. I am heavily influenced by politics, and religion. I have noticed that many who populate these forums are very much into fantasy fiction, which is too escapist for me. Starting threads? I can't wait. I think there is a time limit. My current work deals with themes of environmentalism, class, racism, and sexism, all melding into an overall theme of bullying and hypocrisy.
I think you can start threads right off, you just can't start Workshop threads. So you could start a thread to discuss your ideas and get suggestions and critique, just not on your actual "story on paper" writing of it.
I'm going to take a whack at this thread, since I'm currently in the process of creating an alien race, and I'd like to put down my approach in words so that I can better understand it myself. 1. Core idea. You're probably going to have a starting point for what you'd like your alien species to be. Slug monsters perhaps? Parasites that drain off of a host's life? This will likely tie in to your story. Once you have a decent idea of what your aliens are, you can start retroactively creating a backstory for them. 2. Evolution. Evolution is the starting point for all life. By understanding the circumstances in which a species evolved, you can understand its behavior, its form, and its motivations. An important question here is: why did the species, as it was evolving, develop intelligence? Only one earth species has evolved sapience. It's safe to assume that most species won't. Developing intelligence, or any feature, requires an evolutionary necessity. Why do humans have mouths? Because they have to eat to survive. Why did humans develop intelligence? There are multiple theories, although I subscribe to the idea that intelligence was developed as part of an "arms race," where humans competed with each other for resources and mates. Each generation that survived was progressively more intelligent, because those that weren't didn't survive. Similarly, an alien race is going to have a force that pushes it towards intelligence. Usually that is a competitor of some form. It could be the race itself, predators, a competing intelligent race, or the environment. Or another alien species entirely. Some fun examples: The aliens in Antares Dawn evolved with predator competitors called the Swift Eaters, which gave them a really messed up paranoid view of the world, because they were afraid that any other intelligent life would eat their babies. The aliens in Pandora's Star evolved with two forms, motile and immotile, due to the demands of their planet. The motiles could actually move around and do stuff, and the immotiles were intelligent. The Krag from The Man of War Series were rats, stolen from earth, and evolved into really scary smart creatures by an external entity. 3. Civilization. As your race is evolving, it is going to develop civilization. Why and how does civilization develop? Your evolving aliens will need the ability to make tools, and an incentive to create them (possibly predatorily or environmental). Civilization is going to then need a reason to grow. In humans, the driving force could be seen as the continual hunt for more resources, competing against environmental and competitive pressures. That creates economics, trade, and politics. Resources motivate humans, but what motivates your aliens? It could be resources, or something else. All up to you. 4. Motives. These are key, and are closely intwined with how your species developed evolutionarily, and culturally. What makes them tick? Why do they get off the couch every morning, so to speak? By understanding how your aliens evolved and developed civilization, you will be able to develop many other aspects of their appearance and attitudes from that environment. In some cases, you'll find a feature that you want your aliens to have, like a third arm, and you'll then find an evolutionary justification for how that could have happened. In other cases, as you understand the environment they developed in, you'll say "Hey, if they needed the third arm as a means of reaching really tall plant life, then wouldn't they also have the ability to jump really high or climb well?" Stuff like that. With an idea of how your aliens are in hand, you can develop their culture in other aspects. 5. Politics. How do your aliens organize politically? Don't fall into the trap of giving humans interesting political factions, while making your aliens seem flat and uninteresting with only a single power faction that is hellbent on destroying all humans. 6. Resources. What resources do your aliens need? How do they get them? How does that create friction with other races. 7. Reproduction. How do your aliens reproduce? Reproduction is at the core of how a species expands itself, and is the driving force behind its evolution. It can be crucial to understanding them. See: The Mote in God's Eye, by the dream team, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. I've always found the most believable alien races to be those that have their own unique way of thinking, have complicated cultures, and have a diverse cast of characters that won't all like or agree with each other, and will themselves have different perspectives and voices. Imagine an alien that is completely against your protagonist. Now imagine one that can work with your protagonist. Now imagine an alien in the same species that would dislike both of those characters. Aliens should be their own, interesting, well-developed species. General anti-patterns (things to avoid): Aliens that look exactly like earth creatures, but are smarter Aliens that have a single minded goal (destroy all humans. See: Macross Zentradi. These aliens work because they were created as warriors. Without this context they would be unrealistic, because they are too war-focused) Aliens with a single political faction Aliens that could never realistically evolve on their own (without explanation of how they came about otherwise)
I believe that what makes aliens unique and feel alien is the way the are portrayed to think and the actions that they do, it's also important to note what kind of setting that they are in, are you going for hard sci-fi like arrival or more space opera science fantasy like Hitch Hikers guide to the galaxy? It all depends on the tone you want to execute, because the more alien you make them the more wonderment and mystery it causes, whilst more humanoid/animal designs make the universe more familiar allowing you to focus on its other aspects. I guess it becomes a question of how front and centre do you want them to be. I usually go for more animal humanoid (ish) type aliens that have aspects of alien features. Like for example: Instead of making the warrior race ugly, big, strong and dumb I make them cunning and psychopathic; they aren't warriors out of choice but because they physically are incapable of being peaceful- it's just not in their nature- and I give them aspects that would make sense why they are so violent- from a carnivorous ecosystem, biology maximised for combat such as two rib cages or anti-ballistics hide, whilst also making them look like something we humans would fear like large lizards such as crocodiles or komodo dragons etc. Whilst more diplomatic races, such as traders or diplomats would look more friendly; more aquatic and smooth, have a more compatible biology and look more familiar and friendly and be more similar. I think a good way of making something alien is by how far from human they look and if they are designed after things we find hostile or friendly.
@Matt E has a great post. But I want to turn it around a bit, and look at the question from a story point of view. We see a lot of aliens in SF that are humans with a tweak. There's a reason for this: the story is about 'people' and the tweak is usually meaningful to the theme. The aliens are a device, so the level of alienness may be driven by story need, instead of building an alien and trying to shape a story around it. (I'm not saying not to start with the worldbuild approach, but just explaining there's more than one way for aliens to be in a story). The late great Ursula K LeGuin's Left Hand of Darkness had a genderless humanoid species, the themes included justice, prejudice, greed, jealousy... These might have been drowned out by the worldbuilding if we kept getting distracted by a species that was crystalline and wanted to sort everything into threes. In contrast, Solaris had an alien that we just couldn't understand. It wasn't hostile, it wasn't benevolent, it was just Solaris doing Solaris, indifferent to the Earthers in orbit. But this highlighted the themes, which were about what it actually means to explore the unknown, or to be isolated, to have an identity of one's own versus being part of a culture or relationship. And another example is Gibson's thinking machines in Neuromancer. Wintermute and Rio, who wanted to... well, who knows really. It's a computer thing, we wouldn't understand. But their goal was not a McGuffin - it was genuinely the primary motivator for the plot. Whatever their... hoodjamawidget... meant, it was worth killing a human for.
I'd like to recommend adding: aliens that are analogues of earth animals, smarter or no (eg background fauna that's just like some Earth creature, but - get this - striped!). Space cats. Space spiders. Space whales. C'mon, it's a big universe, there must be more niches out there. Somebody's grazing plasma in a star's corona, what would that look like?
That seems to me a big assumption that we are the conclusion and/or logical, we could just be prove in the end to be one of those dead-end offshoots that evolution is littered with... and don't forget we and the rest of the mammals may only have gotten our chance to become top creature because the previous stronger contenders died off on the pathway (if the asteroid had not hit earth, reptiles might have evolved a fair bit more - or there may have been no creature that evolved to a comparable level of sentient intelligence, we just don't know). In the TV series Future Is Wild cephalopods were at the end - 200 million years on - both terrestrial and taking the first steps towards replacing apes/humanoids and while I hold reservations on their speculative jumps... for the purposes of fiction, I could see them working... Convergent evolution does imply that similar problems will often bring similar evolutionary answers. But not always...
And even then, it's still only converging on solutions on the same planet. We're all at 1G, for example. Eyes? Optical solutions may be completely different at the bottom of a taller gravity well, even if they take an extra billion years to develop.
Slightly off topic, but I felt really let down when ST:TNG tried to explain why almost every intelligent species in the galaxy was a hominoid. Firstly, because the explanation (genetic seeding by a benevolent alien race billions of years ago) was so weak. But secondly, because the canonical novels were rich with non-hominoid UFP member species. Crystalline, invertebrate, space born, synthetic/engineered, aquatic... the TV series just seems to have abandoned those worlds. Budgets, for sure.
Billions of years of sporadically choosing something. All those dice rolls came up with a design that worked. I see no reason to assume that there aren't countless other designs that could have worked, but didn't happen to come up on the dice. (Edited to add: Again, I miss several pages of posts. Is it my brain or my browser? Brain seems likely.)
Evolution can also only work with what it's already created. It can't start from scratch. We for example, owe our body shape to an ancient worm that just happened to create a bilaterally symmetric organism, but there are lots of other types of symmetry and the first types of creatures were fractal. Our eyes evolved in water, which is why they are fluid and actually kind of suck. We have lungs because we started with gills. What happens in those first billion years can be very different, which evolve wildly differently.
I will suggest you think about what do you want to do with your aliens. Think about their society. Laws, rules, philosophy of life, etc. Once you have decided that, think where they live because that will influence their skin colour, unique features. For example, let's suppose you want to create an aquatical alien. Their body could be like a fish, but not 100%. They could have fins, especially in their hands, or in another part of their body. Create weakness; maybe they can't go to land. I hope this helps. Keep on good work and have fun
In an Arthur C. Clarke short story, I remember there were unintelligent gasbag-like aliens living in Jupiter that could communicate via an organic radio system. Which when you think about it, isn't that much weirder than bioluminesence. And one thing to note is that humans, despite often being depicted as the Great Zero of the Universe, are actually unusual and even exceptional in quite a few ways compared to other Earth creatures (in ways beyond being intelligent). For example--we don't have a fixed "mating period" in the year, so compared to most animals we're positively obsessed with sex, making it a very strong driving force for our society and lives. We're quite a bit more resilient than most other animals of our size (and some much bigger ones), and our endurance is exceptional.
For one of the most fascinating alien races, check out the Cheela from Robert L Forward's "Dragon's Egg." For ease of writing, I tend to make a lot of humanoid aliens. Microscopic beings adapted to a neutron star that has thousands of times the gravity of Earth, and works on a time scale thousands of times faster make for difficult conversation partners. With the humanoid aliens, I take Cat from Red Dwarf as a good example. Over the course of millions of years, cats evolved on a space ship into a humanoid form (but much more vain.) The ship was full of things meant for humans, thus any being who is to succeed in such an environment would have to evolve into a similar shape. Otherwise, how are you going to use the can opener? I extrapolate that to the technology they have. If they have space ships, they need to have some way to manipulate objects to build said ships. Of course, that doesn't necessarily mean hands. For the Cheela, it was pseudopods.
I can't remember where I read it or saw it but....the planet had a race of super smart telepathic humanoid aliens but they had no eyes and lived a symbiotic relationship with a four-legged alien species that was canine-like. The humanoid aliens could telepathically see through the canine alien's eyes and the canine aliens got to benefit from the humanoid aliens technology. Might be a cool concept you could use.
Seems like it's based on an idea like the blind beggar and the beggar with no legs, who were always fighting over who owned the region (did you know beggars own areas? If you ask them, they definitely do). There was a big fire one day and the only way either one could escape was if they cooperated—the legless man riding on the shoulders of the blind man and guiding him.
Thanks for the ideas and recommendations. I have never written fiction or sci-fi texts, but I have always admired the ability of writers from these areas to describe their characters very colorfully and clearly.
The human race is the best race to write about. Aliens are second best. If you must have an alien character, try to emphasize what makes him or her (or it?) similar to humans.
Are you challenging my knowledge of the English language? You must be aware that the word "race" is used interchangeably with "species" when describing our species. I would even say that the usage of "human species" is much less common among English speakers than the usage of "human race."
More like scientific terminology (though I should be careful here, I'm no massive science fan, nor highly knowledgeable about it myself). Yes, just like the terms 'theory' and 'myth' are used incorrectly all the time in common parlance. Just because a lot of people say it doesn't make it correct. Of course, if the characters in the story aren't science-savvy, they may well say race. But I mean, this is a writing message board after all, a big part of what we do is point out mistakes in word usage (at risk of being called grammar Nazis ). And it's probably important that the author know this, whether the characters do or not. Humans (Homo sapiens) are the most abundant and widespread species of primates... Source
The use of the term "human race" to refer to our species is so pervasive among English speakers that it makes no sense at all to say that it is "incorrect".
