Designing an Alien Species for Fun and Profit

For decades, science fiction writers and scientists alike have speculated about life on other planets. The possibilities they've come up with range from funny-looking humans (Thanks, Star Trek!) to completely incomprehensible horrors from beyond the limits of sanity (Thanks, H. P. Lovecraft!). This offers modern authors a wide range of possibilities to choose from, which can be liberating and terrifying all at the same time. On the one hand, the possibilities are endless. On the other hand... okay, where do I start?

Intelligence

 If an alien species is going to be a meaningful part of diplomatic negotiations (successful or otherwise), it's going to have to be at least as smart as humans. If it's going to be the one who seeks us out, then unless we already have FTL technology by the time of whenever the story is set, they're going to default to smarter than us. Why? Because the nearest galaxy is maybe a dozen light years away, and your alien species will need to have determined that there's something worth checking out on our insignificant little planet, or else they wouldn't have bothered.

That's not to say that individual aliens within your species can't be idiots. You get those all over.

Appearance

As indicated above, this can range from really really human to really really not. Many early aliens in visual media looked human simply because there was no such thing as ILM. In the Star Trek universe, most of the sympathetic aliens resemble humans with accessories because the Progenitor seeded a butt-ton of world with genetic material, and let evolution do the rest. Star Wars, being set in a space opera universe with a bigger budget, has a wide variety of aliens, made even more diverse with the addition of motion-capture and fully CGI sharacters. In written media, of course, you have a lot more freedom to make your aliens look like whatever the heck you want, but be cautious with aliens that are obviously not humans with weird makeup.

Non-humanlike aliens can even resemble familiar Earth species, like cat people (a favorite, for some reason), lizard people, or even insects. In general, the less mammalian they look, the harder it is for we humans to relate to them. Give them weird senses and a corresponding lack of familiar anatomy, and the average first contact team is going to be cautious, if not initially afraid of them. Once you start getting into the more mind-bending aliens like sapient colors (I have seen this played for laughs and for horror), it gets harder and harder to comprehend them, until you get the sort of things that should not logically follow the same laws pf physics, let alone biology, that we do.

Culture

Admit it. Coming up with a completely alien culture is hard as hell. Most fictional cultures will have some aspect of a familiar human culture, even if it isn't practiced openly, locally, or currently. This can be a good thing, if you want to use this fictionalized culture to make a social statement, but you will need to tread carefully and change things up. Transplanting an earth culture into your story wholesale can smack of lazy writing (no matter how awesome lion-folk Spartans would be). In general, your fictional species' culture needs to be an organic extension of the sort of environment they developed in, what they find important, and what they're naturally skilled at. That means you will need to build the heck out of their home-world and come up with a history for them, even if your human characters never find out much about it.

Mentality

Aliens are weird. They're supposed to be. Even familiar-looking behaviors and rituals can be performed for reasons that come completely out of left field, and understanding why can be a major part of the story (see Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card for one example). Then you have the critters whose sense of morality is so completely divorced from ours that we have a hard time predicting what they will do any why, and they might have no concept of why what they did was wrong. Trying to weed out malicious behavior from attempts to help can be fun and horrifying by turns, depending on how you swing it. Try taking a quality and turning its importance3 up until the knob breaks, and see what that does to your creation's mindset.

In Conclusion

Creating a completely new alien species can be either piles of fun or an exercise in hair-tearing frustration. There's a lot of thought and world-building that can go into it if you want to have a meaningful first-contact scenario, but if you really get into it you can have almost as much fun working out the details of your species as you do writing a story featuring it. If you have fun writing about it, chances are your audience will have fun reading about it.

Secondary Characters are People, Too!

In this week's post I'm going to talk about the secondary characters you might have wandering around in your work. If handled improperly, secondary and background characters will seem like part of the scenery rather than add to the flavor of your world. Why? Because it's so easy to have your secondaries just exist for the scene (or two, or whatever) they're in and then get stuffed back in the creative closet.

This is a mistake, but an understandable one. Your main characters--your protagonist(s) and your villain(s)--carry the bulk of the story, so naturally you want to focus on them. Your heroes have motivations. Hopefully your villains have motivations, too, that sound reasonable to them, rather than just having them wander around aimlessly being evil at people. But the people milling around in the background? Who cares about them?

Well, you should. You created them for a reason, and even if they're literally only there for a single scene to contribute a single piece of needed info to your hero, they need lives outside the story. This might seem like a lot of hard work that nobody's going to see, and you might be right.  BUT, that guy milling around in the background might turn out to be helpful to your hero at a crucial moment.

Remember that crowd of train passengers in Spider-Man 2 that Our Intrepid Hero nearly kills himself saving from Doctor Octopus? They came to his defense when Ock tried to finish him off because they saw that Spidey was "only a kid", like any of their own offspring. They didn't have much in the way of character development, but they helped the hero. They might have been listed in the credits as Bystander on Train #1 through #9 or whatever, but they had a reason to jump to his defense.

Now, unless you're writing a sweeping high fantasy epic or whatever, it's unlikely that you're going to break out in mass quantities of background characters. However, you do need to know who your named characters are, at least, in case you need an unexpected ally (or obstacle) for your hero at a key moment in your story.

Does this mean you need to provide a complete backstory for every single character who has even a walk-on part in your novel or short story? No, obviously not. That would be a lot of record-keeping, and a project you should only undertake if you're planning on lots and lots of ground-level world-building. Even then, just focus on a small handful of people in your fictional city of ten million, or you'll be so busy making characters that you'll never get to your story.

In conclusion, while the focus of your story should be on your main cast, don't neglect that background characters. Making sure that at least you know who they are beyond the context of the story will help you make them more rounded for the reader. Mapping out what secondary characters are doing while off-screen will also help you get them in the right place at the right time for some additional support for your main characters, and who knows? Heroic Bystander #2 might become a fan favorite as a result.

Researching Your Novel for Fun and Profit

Writing is about more than creating. Yes, creation is an overwhelming part of it, but even if you write fiction (and this includes speculative fiction), eventually you're going to have to do a bit of research.

But why? I hear you cry. If I'm making up an entire world, then what I say goes, right?

Well... almost.

Even if you're starting with bare-bones worldbuilding, you need to start with some point of reference, and this goes triple for if you're writing a story set in "The Real World" or "Like Earth Except". Most fictional societies are, at their base, analogues of real-world societies, because that's what our brains understand. And, really, if you don't put some familiar structures in your setting, sooner or later the reader will hit a point where they throw the book against a wall because nothing makes any damn sense.

Don't worry, fellow writers... research doesn't have to be brain-crampingly hard. This isn't going to be like that term paper at school that you absolutely hated, mainly because you're picking the topic and approach. (It will use the same skills, though. Sorry.) In fact, since you're using your novel's outline as a framework to hang your research on, things will actually be a lot easier.

For example, my novella Sheep's Clothing is set in 1864, in what isn't yet Colorado. Already I have a whole pile of research topics to explore: How heavily-populated is it? What sorts of plants and animals can be found there? What are frontier-dwellers like? What are the social norms? What weapons are commonly available?

Next, I have my narrator, a doctor who was born and educated in New York City. What is his skillset? What is the extent of medical knowledge at that time? Would he know herbal medicine? Would he need to specifically learn how to use a gun? Can he fight at all?

Third, I have my supernatural critters: three vampires and a werewolf. I found this to be the most fascinating part of my research because I got to explore what the local myths were about these creatures, and what the average person was likely to know about them if they came from different backgrounds. I learned that vampires weren't exactly a pop culture monster yet, because Dracula hadn't been written yet, and there wouldn't be an iconic media werewolf until 1931. However, Native American lore had passable examples of both, giving me another avenue for research that I happily explored. Also, I discovered that the average frontier-dweller wouldn't have even heard of vampires, offering another angle for fun.

From there I Googled and wikiwalked and dug around for the little factoids I needed, and even hit up one of my co-workers for setting-related details to keep readers who are familiar with the Western genre from screaming "WRONG!!!" and throwing my book across the room. Even nailing down the details can be fun, as I discovered that Lakota (Wolf Cowrie's native language) was kind of light on swear words. Apparently Native Americans never learned to swear until the white men came. No, seriously. But I was able to supply dialogue for his moment of frustration by finding a Lakota phrase roughly translating to "idiot". (In case you're wondering, it was "takuni slolye sni". Literally "crazy white man", which fit the context better than anything else I could find.)

Now, my example is a fairly lightweight one, since the setting was "Like Earth Except", but you can use this as a jumping-off point for more worldbuilding-intensive stories. Writing medieval fantasy? Research tech levels and costuming. Writing military sci-fi? See what you can dig up on military protocols and physics. Writing horror? Get down to the roots of a monster and take it in a new direction, or dig up some obscure urban legends and turn them into something fresh.

It is said that baseball is a nerd's pastime, but in my opinion, writing can be the equivalent for geeks. Just imagine how much you can dig up on any topic thanks to the internet, or books, or local experts. Then imagine how much of that you can incorporate into your world, and you might just discover that your story is half-written for you.