Making "Alien Aliens"

[speaker-to-trolls]

When people complain about problems in sci fi writing one that comes up frequently is "aliens should act like aliens, not humans in makeup" or something to that effect. I've made the complaint many times myself, I'm not saying there's no validity to it. I've just started to wonder, how the hell do you do it?

See, human beings have a bewildering array of different ways of viewing the world and one another, it'd be hard enough to make yourself understand the thought processes of someone from, I don't know, a hunter gatherer tribe or an ancient civilisation, or a future civilisation where everyone's got internet access in their heads. And when people tell writers to make 'alien aliens' they are (as I understand it) saying "take everything you can understand about those people, then remove it, and put something else there". The problem is that writers are human, so it's going to be a little hard for them to really understand the drives of such creatures, and especially hard to make a half-way believable society created by such. 'Believable society' is an important phrase here, it's easy to make an alien society which is different to human society, but not believable, simply by expanding upon some human or animal characteristics, but this doesn't make for a credible society of intelligent beings.

Now there are examples where the people in question at least seem to be fundamentally different to humans, ironically usually in the form of fairly human-looking aliens (for instance, the Other Men in Stapledons Star Maker) but I wonder when reading about these 'yeah, but is that really different to what you'd get from a human society?'

So, does anyone have any ideas on how writers can present the idea of alien-ness in the alien people and societies they write about? Furthermore, do you think aliens actually need to be fundamentally different from humans, or is it likely that there are fundamental similarities which will shine through despite any differences?

[Mayabird]

Just look at some fossils, especially some from before the dinosaurs. There were some very bizarre things running around our own planet. What the hell were Tully Monsters, anyway?

It could be that the process of creating a technological civilization requires that creatures either have or obtain a certain kind of thought process, meaning there would be some kind of similarities between species that meet. But it might not be so, and if we're not dealing with a technological civilization, there might be no room for communication at all; it'd just be too alien for us. How would you talk to intelligent equivalents of our Ediacaran...thingies?

[Junghalli]

What I like to do is work from the ground up. First, plan out the evolutionary history of the aliens, determine what sort of physical features and behavior patterns would arise from that history, and then once you've got that down go about figuring out what sort of culture such beings would develop.

For instance, say you've got a planet tilted on its side like Uranus. What sort of creatures might evolve there, and what sort of culture would they develop? Or say you have tree-dwelling aliens living on a planet like Midworld, where you have kilometer-tall trees and a whole ecosystem that never sees the ground. What sort of aliens would evolve there, and what would they be like? Etc.

Try to look at human societies and think about how they'd change if you altered some basic factor. For instance, human families are based on male-female pair-bonds. But what about a species where males and females didn't bond like ours do, but instead children are raised by the mother and siblings? You get a very different social structure and very different ideas about proper personal conduct, morality, society etc. Although I think there's a society in India that's sort of like this, so maybe it's not quite as alien as it looks at first glance.

[Samuel]

So far, alot of what I have seen in making alien aliens doesn't work so well. You take out things that exist because they are necesary and it ends up rather stupid.

There are ways around it, but an alien society isn't going to be impossible to understand or interact with. They have to fit in certain categories if they want to get into space.

I'll give an example (aside from the stupid "we don't use medicine")- Galactic Civilizations. Yeah, not great, but here I go. We have 12 different groups and only about 3 others would be truly alien compared to us (if we ignore the space magic)- the Yor, the Thalans and the Iconians. The first are robots, the second are time travelers and the third have had a society that has been tremendously warped.

Why do you want to make alien aliens? For a story, curious how it is done/is possible, what?

[Junghalli]

So far, alot of what I have seen in making alien aliens doesn't work so well. You take out things that exist because they are necesary and it ends up rather stupid.

This is true. This is a problem with trying to make aliens alien just for the heck of it: some aspects of human behavior are probably there for a reason. The child-rearing habits of the Race from Harry Turtledove's books is a good example. I could see an intelligent species with no real parental instinct developing, with the youngsters just learning survival skills by imitation, but how the heck does such a culture ever get past Stone Age? They'd realistically probably have been doomed to never get beyond the technological level of Cro-Magnon man, and still have been hunting dinner with spears when the first human starship arrived at Tau Ceti in 2250.

[Singular Intellect]

I think that that one 'alien' perspective that is truly different from us (yet we are still able to understand it's potential behavior relatively well) is artificial intelligence/lifeforms.

[Junghalli]

You know, it occurs to me that if you take what was supposed to be the typical pattern for intelligent species in Worldwar-verse (like the Race), and logically think about what it means for the technological development of a species (they'll never get past Stone Age), Worldwar-verse would have a pretty solid explanation for the Fermi Paradox if it wasn't for the Race developing interstellar travel by authorial fiat.

[speaker-to-trolls]

Try to look at human societies and think about how they'd change if you altered some basic factor. For instance, human families are based on male-female pair-bonds. But what about a species where males and females didn't bond like ours do, but instead children are raised by the mother and siblings? You get a very different social structure and very different ideas about proper personal conduct, morality, society etc. Although I think there's a society in India that's sort of like this, so maybe it's not quite as alien as it looks at first glance.

See I've run into that kind of thing when trying to envisage an alien society, in fact I actually based one around the idea of a pseudo-leonine social structure where the male-female bonds were done on the basis of a group of males with a group of females, with the females raising the young. But then I heard about theories that this was similar to human societies in the EEA (Evolutionary Environment of Adaptation) anyway, and furthermore it seemed to me that male-female pair bonds could actually be the best way for both partners to maximise their reproductive potential, certainly is for the males at least. I also intended them to be kind of matriarchal, but worked out that, if males were bigger and stronger than females, a tribe with more males would have an advantage, hence tribes would tend to have more males, and hence the males would be able to bully their way into a position of dominance.
So essentially they would end up with... us, but shaped like green lion-rat-crocodile people.

Why do you want to make alien aliens? For a story, curious how it is done/is possible, what?

A little of both, I'm interested in how you could imagine and describe an alien culture just in principle, and on peoples ideas about what alien intelligence might be like, and I might try to write some alien beings into a story in the future. Not necessarily space aliens, but non-human beings who I'd want to be noticeably different from humanity as a whole.

I say 'might', I have commitment issues which crop up when I try to write something.

[Samuel]

A little of both, I'm interested in how you could imagine and describe an alien culture just in principle, and on peoples ideas about what alien intelligence might be like, and I might try to write some alien beings into a story in the future. Not necessarily space aliens, but non-human beings who I'd want to be noticeably different from humanity as a whole.

I say 'might', I have commitment issues which crop up when I try to write something.

Sounds like me, but with an actual chance of writinng occuring.

Do you want culturally differances or biological ones which lead to cultural ones? The first are more easily bridgeable, the second? Not as much.

[Junghalli]

I also intended them to be kind of matriarchal, but worked out that, if males were bigger and stronger than females, a tribe with more males would have an advantage, hence tribes would tend to have more males, and hence the males would be able to bully their way into a position of dominance.

Why would the males have to be bigger than the females? There are creatures on Earth where the female is dominant (spotted hyenas, for instance). An alien species could just as easily have our sex dismorphism reversed (females bigger, males smaller).

Also note that if you're worried that some feature of your alien might be evolutionarily suboptimal - so are many features of humans. Evolution is more survival of the least inadequate than survival of the fittest. It's not like engineering where intelligent aliens probably would build stuff that looked a lot like ours because intelligent designers would closely follow the most optimal possible designs. As long as the feature isn't crippling there's plenty of room to have fun with suboptimal features.

[Oni Koneko Damien]

Read up on Lovecraft. Yeah, there are many shortcomings in his writing, but the one thing he did better than pretty much anyone else is showing alien mindsets and how they occasionally relate to humanity.

You have the Mi-Go, which don't really give a shit about humanity, and only communicate with a few and use them to keep others away from their mines on earth because so far it's simply not worth the bother to wipe out the species. They communicate with each other through shifting coloured antennae, and have to rely on technology to communicate with other species. Even then their communication with people is hampered by the fact that they simply cannot grasp the concept that voices can change pitch.

The best example, though, would be The Colour out of Space. Basically it's a presumably sentient creature, but so completely alien in biology, intelligence, and methods of communication that it took over a year for anyone to even realize it was even a living thing.

[Teleros]

Few things to think about (some mentioned):

1. What do they look like? If they look revolting to us, will we look revolting to them? What effect will this have on relations? If they're going to be building things and working together then, short of telekinesis they'll need some sort of means of moving themselves and other things - even if this is perhaps a symbiotic relationship with another species or something even more outlandish.

2. How do they communicate (as OKD mentioned)? If they have a language like we do, how is it constructed? Has it grown like English, or is it more logically constructed? Some sort of communication is probably necessary though, because it's such a fundamental thing in life.

3. How do they think? For a space-faring civilisation you can expect some degree of logical thought, because things like the scientific method are going to be hard if nobody can think rationally(!).

4. Morality - what is / isn't moral for them? There may well be cross-overs between humans and aliens here, even if a particular form of ethics isn't widespread. Have they had their own JS Mill or Kant in history - and if so, how relevant are such ideas today? As Junghalli said, what if their families are set up differently?

5. Culture will be very important as far as all of the above points go. Religious fundamentalists today place little emphasis on rational thought and a lot on following dogma, whilst goths like the colour black, etc etc etc. In addition, has there been a need for a particular culture to develop? A near-extinction event will result in a very different culture on Earth today (say goodbye to individual rights, for example), and so on. Or do they even have a culture?

6. Timescale - how long do these creatures live, and what sort of timescales do they think on naturally? A bunch of aliens evolving somewhere like Pluto might take years to think even simple thoughts, but in turn live many thousands of human lives. Communicating and understanding them will be a difficult one, but on the plus side they probably won't be much of a threat unless they've had enough of a head start on us.

7. What is their homeworld like? Assuming for a moment that they're not altering themselves to new environments, then this will affect a good number of the above points. Doc Smith's "Ploorans" went through four drastic changes each year depending on the season, due to a combination of their sun's varying output, the position of their planet and such. If one took a ship elsewhere though, they'd remain in the form they left their world in unless they encountered the right triggers to change into the next form.

An alien species could just as easily have our sex dismorphism reversed (females bigger, males smaller).

Happens often enough on Earth as well - look at a lot of insect & arachnid species.

[Coyote]

I found the aliens in CJ Charryh's "Chanur" series to be pretty good.

At the risk of sounding like a cop-out, unless your story is specifically about how aliens these people are, and our attempts to comprehend them, don't worry about it to the point of incapacitating yourself. At some point your aliens are going to get along with people because they are similar, and have similar concerns.

Let's say humans meet three aliens while traveling space--
Alien A-- about our size, two legs & feet, two hands, funny bumpy forehead, big eyes that see infrared, has three wives who lay eggs instead of give birth. Difficult language made up of a lot of clicking noises, vegetarians.
Alien B-- giant, whale-size jellyfish like creature that floats in the atmosphere of a gas giant, eats air plankton, reproduces by pollination with others and communicates by a mixture of sound pulses and short-range "empathic broadcast".
Alien C-- Several meters tall, multiple legs, eats small furry rodents live with help of separable jaw, completely decentralized organ system able to avoid damage by things that would kill humans, communicates by an odd kind of "natural radio" over long distances, reproduce by budding.

There's not much basis for comprehension or cooperation with Aliens B and C, there's not much in common. Sure, you can maybe communicate with them, but you'll quickly run out of things to say since your reference points aren't exactly up one anothers' alley, and their concerns are not your concerns (and vice versa). They can't build ships or buildings together that can be truly practical for both species. Things that harm one don't matter to another. In the end, there's no basis for comparison or cooperation-- even fighting them makes no sense, because they have nothing we value to take.

So, if your story is about how a bunch of utterly disparate aliens get together and form an alliance, I'd say the alliance will winnow down to the handful that gets along because of common concerns and reference points. The ones that can build tools the others can use. Otherwise, you strain credulity by trying to make reasonable an alliance between, say, an caterpillar and a Humpback Whale.

[Nieztchean Uber-Amoeba]

Really, just think about how our minds work. Consider how our concept or 'property' relates to ideas of personal space because we can divide land between ourselves fairly obviously.

Now consider a floating squid-bird-jellyfish that evolves in a gas giant, and thus has no definite idea of space or land - effectively the ultimate nomads. They might have no concept of property or territory without anything to relate it to.

Consider how ideas in our organic, cellular brains are processed and how that influences our reactions. Now consider a puddle of intelligent silicon whose mind operates on a mechanical level, thinking in logical, lingual strings of code.

Consider an asexual species, without reference to any idea of gender or competition to gain female attention or two-person social groups for procreating.

Consider a species wherein certain emotions manifest in completely different ways than they do in humans.

You see where I'm going with this? Further, the point is not to make aliens that do things that normal people do - even if they do things that outlier human societies do, that's enough. The point is what that would do if it was the norm, with cultural values all deriving from these social ideas, and thus morality ending up skewed from our perspective, and this society having its own outliers on both sides of the spectrum.

The point is not to present an Alien that is incomprehensible, in most writing. It is to present a way of thinking that the reader will find uncomfortable and difficult while at the same time being plausible.

[Coyote]

In fact, an asexual species may find us humans incredibly annoying and frustrating to work with-- we spend way too much time trying to attract members of the opposite sex, we waste huge amounts of resources on things to make us pretty or smell nice or appear more colorful or wealthy than we are; half the time even when we devote ourselves to do a good job on something it's so we can impress a girl (or guy) so they can't even be sure of our motivations when we devote to a task.

They may be quite unhappy about having to work with us. "My lab partner's a human? Fuck-- that means I carry the load while he preens all day. So much for my GPA."

[Nieztchean Uber-Amoeba]

Indeed. But what if you had to take a double-workload while your partner got two weeks' maternity leave off to bud and seperate? And he did this every fucking year?

More suggestions: Dualism and symmetry are central aspects of Human psychology and Art, largely because we are symmetrical beings with two of everything. Consider a hermit crab-type situation where an animal is non-asymmetrical. I haven't thought through my speculation on that divergence yet, but that's the point - we don't know how they would act, so making them 'alien' shouldn't be too hard.

More suggestions: Taking the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of language into account, how do you think a species that uses radio signals for communication and as a sense would develop?

A Hive-structured organism where the death of a single member is meaningless.

One of those Sex= Male dies now animals.

Extreme sexual dymorphism.

All of these things could have huge impacts on how a species thinks and how their culture develops. All it takes is a lot of imagination and thought to make that, well, 'Alien'.

[Junghalli]

More suggestions: Dualism and symmetry are central aspects of Human psychology and Art, largely because we are symmetrical beings with two of everything. Consider a hermit crab-type situation where an animal is non-asymmetrical. I haven't thought through my speculation on that divergence yet, but that's the point - we don't know how they would act, so making them 'alien' shouldn't be too hard.

I've often figured that our natural tendency to break things down into neat dualisms (good/evil, liberal/conservative etc.) has something to do with the fact that it's the way our bodies are built. A species that had a different body symmetry might have a very different concept of, say, good and evil.

[Serafina]

An important point: How do they develop technology?

They need both a reason and a way to develop technology.
The development of technology was heavily linked to social changes - take agriculture or the industrial revolution (which would have been impossible without large cities, or at least really different.)
How does it work for an alien culture?

Lets take our floating gas-planet inhabitants.
First, they need something similar to our agricultural revolution - a way to significantly increase population density.
Instead of farming, a interlinked system of traps (assuming they live of some kind of air-plankton) could increase the amount of gathered food greatly. Those traps are likely to be mobile (they float).
Thus, they would not have such distinctive territorial claims as humans.
But then again, perhaps they do: The lower regions of the atmosphere could have more food - giving us a reason for conflicts.

The density of the population is still limited - you can only catch so much air-plankton on x cubic meters. But they can more easily support large populations - there is no real shortage on food.

Their society will propably way more mobile as ours - they do not have a reason to develop any kind of static structure. They have tents, and all kind of mobile buildings.
But they also need to adjust to being constantly on the move - they are blown around by the wind, like currents in the oceans. How will this affect their society?

We also need something that brings them to "modern technology". One advantage for all kind of devices: They have free power (wind). But this will propably hamper the development of fuel-based technologys. They wont have nuclear power, either (but fusion is still possible).
A MAJOR disadvantage: They have no (or very few) metals. This proplem can be solved if we plave the species on some "normal" planet - just with fast wind and a dense atmosphere (thus allowing floating creatures).
This would also allow fixed structures and more earth-like cities (they would still be vastly different).

[Vultur]

One big difference would be how different senses affect how a creature perceives the world. The culture of a technological species whose strongest sense was smell would be really strange.

Also, reproductive cycles would make a big difference. I'm not sure if a species with a full-on rut or musth mode would be able to live in cities or any other situation with populations packed in (including any spacecraft whose voyage was too long to fit in between rut cycles).

An egg-laying species might not put nearly as much emphasis on families; if the gravid female wasn't limited in her activities, that would remove one big evolutionary push for structured families. Also, an egg-laying species might be able to produce lots more young, removing much of the need for parental care. Such a species might well be really scary and warlike - it might never have developed altruism. This might limit its technological development, but it might encourage it. Technology develops fastest during wars on Earth -- why should it be different elsewhere? Maybe the most violent species advance fastest. That's not a happy thought...

Species who are sentient as juveniles, then become non-sentient but able to reproduce as adults.

[Junghalli]

Also, reproductive cycles would make a big difference. I'm not sure if a species with a full-on rut or musth mode would be able to live in cities or any other situation with populations packed in (including any spacecraft whose voyage was too long to fit in between rut cycles).

They're obviously able to live in groups, as a solitary creature developing technological civilization isn't really feasible, so there's a limit to how disruptive the mating season can be.

An egg-laying species might not put nearly as much emphasis on families; if the gravid female wasn't limited in her activities, that would remove one big evolutionary push for structured families. Also, an egg-laying species might be able to produce lots more young, removing much of the need for parental care. Such a species might well be really scary and warlike - it might never have developed altruism.

You've basically just described the Race - the problem is how such a species would ever get past Stone Age. You need a culture where olders actively pass their knowledge to youngsters in order to get a technological civilization. You're probably never going to get past subsistence hunter-gatherer level if nobody takes any effort to pass their knowledge on to the next generation.

And I think even that sort of species would have to have altruism. I don't see how any kind of social grouping could work without some level of altruism; if everybody's always looking out for Number 1 and nobody else what's the advantage of living in a group? And I don't see a solitary creature even getting to Stone Age - even if it was intelligent, the technological and cultural development of the species has to start afresh with each individual.

[Mayabird]

To be fair, it takes damn near forever for The Race to advance technologically*.

It might be possible to have intelligent civilized races that don't have the real logical capacity to do it anymore if they were some kind of uplift or artificial species or if they just had weird cultural shifts at some point and lost it and just keep doing things by rote. That would keep them incomprehensible. (Note: since we haven't met any aliens yet, it's really hard to say how these things would work.)


* But I put most of the blame on the fact that some people will buy anything that the guy puts his name on, and he had three kids to put through college, so why not throw together stupid crap if it meant not having to take out loans? I mean, I would be strongly tempted to do it. Money's nice and I'm not that great of a writer to worry about my name being sullied.

[Eleventh Century Remnant]

And that, in itself, pretty much describes the humans of the Imperium of Man.

I've tried to write a sci fi novel including really alien aliens before, and ended up banging my head against the problem.
In the course of trying to come up with something genuinely psychologically different, I inadvertently reinvented the Carbosilicate Amorph- years before I had come across Schlock, it was unintentional.
Essentially a creature that had evolved from something like an octopus, it was a 'biopod' of organs inside one big muscle, a sort of pile of poop shaped sheath of two way fibres and cartilage- picture the octopus with its tentacles all blurred into each other in one big squtch.

The idea was that the control burden of this- I think they were cromatophoric as well-meant that their psychology based itself out of the concept of plasticity; things could always change, 'now' is just a state of flux.
There's always more than one way round a problem. Be on every side at once. Pretend to be on every side at once, it might be true tomorrow. Embrace every possibility. No symmetry at all.

The energy requirements of that mass of muscle- they weighed about 250kg- meant that they had to be omnivores, ready to devour whatever came along; I never did work out what they had evolved along with, didn't really understand that I needed to then, but they had a fair few natural advantages so whatever it was must have been pretty nasty.

So you have a group of omnivorous, lateral-thinking psychologically plastic lifeforms, adept at deception, pretence and moral manoeuvrability. Eventuially, of course, you ahve to describe them in human terms to get them to make sense to the reader. In the end the story collapsed because they were just too damn' good at manipulating the humans, I ended up with Space Lebanon.

I don't think any race can become technological without rebelling against nature to an extent; I'm not sure the reproductive cycle will outlast their attempts to modify it, the agricultural cycle certainly won't, and the ideas they take out of the dawn of reason will be hacked to bits, replaced, rewritten, revived and dismissed a few hundred times, strewing intellectual and cultural baggage along the way.

I think the only way to do it is iterative; rite, rewrite in view of what you've just written, dredraft that to make more sense, redraft it to make less human sense, hybridise the two, etc- trying to crate a synthetic viewpoint to see things from is hard work.

The alternative is the 'fools rush in' strategy, taking something two dimensional and just running with it. It actually seems to be a lot more successful in terms of getting words on paper.

[Enola Straight]

What if a species has a geometry other than bi-lateral?

Lives off of ammonia, and finds oxygen and water toxic?



Even species with radically different biologies may still discover and recognize universal laws governing mathematics, physics, and chemistry.

[Samuel]

I've often figured that our natural tendency to break things down into neat dualisms (good/evil, liberal/conservative etc.) has something to do with the fact that it's the way our bodies are built. A species that had a different body symmetry might have a very different concept of, say, good and evil.

**************Society*************Self****************Family
Helps
Neutral
Hurts

The density of the population is still limited - you can only catch so much air-plankton on x cubic meters. But they can more easily support large populations - there is no real shortage on food.

Unless the amount of food fluctuates, leading to population overshoots and crashes unless...
they find a way to store it. Or they find what the plankton eats and gather it and grow it on stationary platforms.

Their society will probably way more mobile as ours - they do not have a reason to develop any kind of static structure. They have tents, and all kind of mobile buildings.
But they also need to adjust to being constantly on the move - they are blown around by the wind, like currents in the oceans. How will this affect their society?

Connect everything together. The most important things go into the center and are less likely to be blown away. Position is literal.

We also need something that brings them to "modern technology". One advantage for all kind of devices: They have free power (wind). But this will propably hamper the development of fuel-based technologys. They wont have nuclear power, either (but fusion is still possible).

A MAJOR disadvantage: They have no (or very few) metals.

Than how are they making the traps?

Lives off of ammonia, and finds oxygen and water toxic?

They would have to be bacteria. You need oxygen to become efficient enough metabolizers to get multicellular life.

The idea was that the control burden of this- I think they were cromatophoric as well-meant that their psychology based itself out of the concept of plasticity; things could always change, 'now' is just a state of flux.
There's always more than one way round a problem. Be on every side at once. Pretend to be on every side at once, it might be true tomorrow. Embrace every possibility. No symmetry at all.

Death isn't flexible, nor is birth. They would still have things that are fixed. Although the idea that mobility is life could be inherent in them- how can others just stay in one place for extended periods of time?

[Vultur]

They're obviously able to live in groups, as a solitary creature developing technological civilization isn't really feasible, so there's a limit to how disruptive the mating season can be.

Oh, definitely... I was trying for it limiting them living in large numbers in close quarters, not preventing societies period. It seems plausible that a species might be able to get along in a tribe of a few dozen, or a spread out farming village of a couple hundred where each family or equivalent group has its own space, but be unable to cope with the sort of crowded conditions found in a human city, or a submarine or spacecraft. (I was thinking that if too many males in rut are too close together - say, more than two dozen per square mile - the pheromones build up to an unbearable level and cause insanity. A limit of 20 or two dozen adult males in a spread-out group would still allow a group big enough to function as a tribe or small fishing/farming community: 40-50 adults assuming a sex ratio close to 1-to-1 (which needn't be the case for aliens).

You've basically just described the Race - the problem is how such a species would ever get past Stone Age. You need a culture where olders actively pass their knowledge to youngsters in order to get a technological civilization. You're probably never going to get past subsistence hunter-gatherer level if nobody takes any effort to pass their knowledge on to the next generation.

I didn't mean *no* relationship between older and younger generations -- but maybe a much more exploitative one, with the young used as slaves maybe. An egg-laying intelligent species could easily have nightmarish population growth: it might NEED to be incredibly brutal to avoid starvation.

And I think even that sort of species would have to have altruism. I don't see how any kind of social grouping could work without some level of altruism; if everybody's always looking out for Number 1 and nobody else what's the advantage of living in a group?

I think it could be worked out somehow, though the critters would be really alien. I actually have a seed of an idea for a species like this, but it needs way more thought ...