Keep in mind, I tend to build my fictional universe and the species in it before I have a plot figured out. So my approach is in reverse from the way people usually write, which is to fit their aliens to the story they want to tell.ray245 wrote:How would you create an alien political organisation that takes into account of the species biology, as well as avoid turning them into generic stereotypes? Human history is filled with a wide variety of political models, ranging from a nomadic tribal system, democracy, monarchy, communism, dictatorship and etc. How would you create an alien species that reflects their own diversity, with differing opinions about how life should be?
I start from first principles. I figure out what I want their planet to be like. Then I figure out their basic biochemistry (which in most cases will be carbon based but there are variations that can affect other things). Then I figure out what sorts of things might evolve on a given planet and how they might be adapted to live there. There will be a lot of convergent evolution, particularly in basic anatomy like encephalization (organisms will have their nervous system equivalent and sense organs at their top or front, depending on whether they are radially or bilaterally symmetrical), they will have organs that sense some part of the electromagnetic spectrum and that can detect volatile gases and aerosols, and will probably have mechanoreception of some sort (touch, hearing). And of course they will have to have some sort of manipulator appendage.
Right there you can start having fun with interesting perspectives. An alien might be blind to visible light, or only see visible light in monochrome, but see a kaleidoscope in polarized light, UV, or infared. To see longer wavelengths in actual images they will need HUGE retina equivalents. Instead of an eardrum, they might have sensory cilia that let them hear and detect minute air currents over their whole body similar to insects, but would not be able to parse airborne sound--relying instead on signalling with skin color changes, signalling with manipulator appendages, or beating some sort of biological stylus against some other part of their anatomy in a symbolic language contained in the pauses between pulses (like morse code, but without the cypher).
Any sapient species is probably going to be some sort of social problem solver. On earth there are a few options for that, so lets discuss them.
Social predators: Predators often have to solve problems and coordinate their actions, this puts a certain amount of selection on their intellect, not just for problem solving, but cheater-detection systems, complex social relationships, and cultural information transfer. These can blossom into full-blown sentience and have done so on earth at least once, probably twice, and possibly a few more times. Once in the lineage leading to humans, and another in the lineage to dolphins, and has either happened already or we are watching it happen in other ape lineages.
Bonus points if the environment they are in is prone to perturbations such that innovation and abstract thinking are required for survival--like the great rift valley and central africa in the last 10 million years.
Problem solving herding herbivores, long lived: Any herbivore that herds in family groups, and uses problem solving and long memories to survive in changing environments. Elephants come to mind. Living in family groups puts selection on social interactions, while problem solving and things like landscape mapping put selection on the capacity for abstract reasoning. This has the potential to go sapient.
Byproduct: Organisms with a brain with either heavy cognitive demands on it or that is just huge can possibly evolve sapience as an emergent phenomenon without there necessarily being selection for it directly. Certain african parrots dont actually need the abstract reasoning ability they have to survive as parrots, but they have it anyway because other things that are related (like navigating long-distances in three dimensions while micromanaging flight) gave them that as a byproduct. Something like that, that is also social could possibly evolve sapience under the right conditions.
But you will notice something. Sociality. Our intelligence (and the kind of intelligence that will be found in any alien) is not just abstract reasoning. It is the willingness and ability to navigate complex social relationships. This does not only mean self-awareness, but other-awareness. Second order theory (I know that they know X) of mind and higher (like third order: I know that they know that I know X). Third order theory of mind is necessary to detect if someone else is being deceived, and is thus essential for cheater-detection systems in social groups.
An animal with high abstract reasoning but virtually no social behavior outside of mating would be something like an octopus, and something like an octopus will never leave their home planet and go to the stars because they are incapable of the cooperation necessary.
Inside that you can vary all kinds of things. Family structures and mating systems will dictate a lot of their culture. Creatures that spawn in a massive scramble-competition orgy and then brood the eggs inside lungs or the stomach of the mother until they hatch into larvae that suckle from glands on their mother's back will have a somewhat different culture and social systems compared to humans, even though they have solved the same problem humans have (carrying offspring inside themselves for gestational thermoregulation, and dealing with large brain size by way of larvae that undergo a metamorphosis into sapience at the age of a year), they have done so in a very different way and unlike humans dont have much in the way of paternal certainty.
Or you could have something like eusocial insects (or for that matter naked mole rats), where large "extended" family groups consist of a single queen and her offspring (that to create something the size of a village might number in the hundreds over time) that are reared by workers (and all other social functions are handled by workers) who select (probably by diet and chemical signals) what talents will develop in the non-sapient larvae (And they will need to be larvae) when they metamorphose and thus regulate division of labor--without necessarily restricting occupations. For example, someone reared as a protector caste would be inclined to fill a number of different societal roles like police (to the extent needed, which would be low), military etc, while someone reared into an artisan caste might be inclined toward the sciences and medicine as much as metalwork. Such a society will likely be completely foreign because it would be a perfect communism (without the ideology). Nation states might form from long family lineages of related colonies within regions, and despite being territorial, their mass-dispersal or sexuals during mating season eventually mixed their lineages enough that Hamilton's Rule prevailed and they avoided nuclear holocaust.
If you notice a tendency toward larvae, that is a me thing.
