In nearly thirty novels and goodness knows how many short stories, there’s one subject that I’ve not written about much.
And it’s a surprising one for a sci-fi author.
Aliens.
The thing is, I’ve never felt the need to involve them. I’ve got enough to do keeping track of all the humans. I have written a couple of short stories with aliens in and referenced the possibility that they might exist in a few other places, but I’ve never involved them in anything longer. Simply because I’m not sure how to write them.
There are so many fundamental questions.
Are they humanoid?
How do they communicate with us?
Are they peaceful?
Are there more than one race out there? Do they know each other already?
These are big questions that I’ve felt ill-equipped to answer.
The idea that I wouldn’t be able to write authentically about aliens put me off for quite a while. Then, I came to a fundamental realisation. As long as I presented them in a consistent manner, it doesn’t matter.
Because they’re Alien. They won’t necessarily act like us, they may not even look like us. They might be advanced beyond our technology or just different in some ways.
So I’ve embarked on creating a race of Aliens in my Medium serial, All by Myself.
This is roughly how I saw them.
Depressingly humanoid, aren’t they? And the blank faces (by our standards) make them look a little scary.
Still, I have to start somewhere and I thought they would be suitable for the story I have in mind.
I thought about it a lot and decided that nature wouldn’t necessarily waste a perfectly good arrangement of limbs by just using it on one species. I’m sure that other body forms are available.
But I have managed to give them some differences. To improve their dexterity, they have four fingers and two thumbs on each hand. The extra thumb is next to the little finger. More about them will be revealed as the story progresses and I decide what characteristics might better emphasise their alien-ness.
Of course, they do things differently to us, whether in the food they eat or how their spaceships work. Even things we take for granted, like how you use a keyboard can be ‘alienised’ adding to the overall impression of them as different to us. I’m working all that out now.
As for their attitudes and motives, I’m still deciding how I want them to appear. Language is important and the way that the races speak to each other is a source of many potential problems. In storytelling, a bit of ambiguity or potential misunderstanding never hurts.
It would be easy (and possibly fatal) for our human protagonists to take offence at attempts to converse, or to judge the aliens by human standards.
The possibilities are endless.
Like the readers of the story, I’m waiting to find out just where this is going to lead.
New episodes of All By Myself are published on Mondays.
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