How to Build a Believable Alien
27 Oct 2009
Many books, movies and TV shows show aliens as humans with funny makeup and perhaps a few brow ridges. However, the products of a completely different evolution are unlikely to be that similar to us. So how does one go about writing an alien that is believably different, yet comprehensible to the reader?
Your Alien’s Biology: Ecology and Physiology
When creating imaginary alien species, I find it best to start with the biology, and build from that into culture and behavior. There are several basic questions to ask with relation to biology:
1) What does it eat, and what adaptations does it have for acquiring and eating food?
2) What habitat does it live in? What adaptations does it have to live in this habitat?
3) How does it reproduce? Does it reproduce sexually or asexually (budding, splitting in half, cloning)? Does it lay eggs or give live birth? How many offspring does it have at once, and does it protect and feed them?
4) Is it social or solitary?
From Alien Biology to Alien Society
From the answers to these questions we can move on to talking about the alien society. An alien that lays thousands of eggs which it broadcasts into the water to take care of themselves is going to have a very different attitude towards children and a very different concept of family from humanity. A predator that hunts in packs is going to think very differently from a solitary predator or from a herbivore because the basic instincts that a species has will constrain the types of society it is likely to form.
For more information, read books on animal behavior and then read and think about human history and anthropology. It’s fascinating and well worth the time.
Alien Technology: Physical Constraints
The physiology and ecology of the aliens is likely to affect the technology they develop. Obviously, there’s a lack of intelligent species to study, but some guesses can be made. A solitary but intelligent species is probably less likely than a communal one to develop high technology because in a community each generation can learn from the one before and share their knowledge.
No one genius in human society was responsible for all our technological developments. It happened incrementally. Isaac Newton put it very well when he wrote:”If I have seen farther it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” This accumulation of knowledge requires that the knowledge be passed from one person to another and without interaction between individuals this is very difficult to do. Technologies that require more than one person to use or create would also be very difficult to use and would probably not be popular.
Underwater civilizations provide a slightly different problem. Fire is used for a huge a number of things by humans and water puts out most fires. There are certain places in the oceans where very high temperatures are reached and the aspiring individual might be able to smelt metal: hydrothermal vents at hot spots and on the mid-ocean ridges. The latter source requires plate tectonics, and either source would only be usable to groups that lived in certain places or that traveled huge distances across the ocean to smelt metal.
Many underwater species are streamlined and do not have effective hands, which would make many technologies difficult to manipulate. This is not true of all underwater species, especially octopus, squid and their relatives, but it is true of most fish and marine mammals. Together, fire and lack of hand-equivalents are potential problems consider when writing intelligent underwater species traveling to the stars. Of course, if they get help all bets are off.
Alien Thought Patterns
With reference to intellect, the ideal is to create something that thinks as well as a human, but not like a human. It’s quite a challenge, but any attempt to take it on will improve your aliens, as well as being exciting in its own right. It is a challenge that I think should be applied more often to non-human fantasy characters as well. If you have dragons or talking cats in your story, why would they think just like humans?
2 Responses
2009 Oct 29
A very interesting article. I don’t actually create ‘aliens’ in the first book of my recent fantasy ntrilogy, Randolph’s Challenge Book One – The Pendulum Swings, but I do create other species of humankind and supernatural beings. I think the same advice given here also applies to the characters I create, even if they are not strickly ‘alien’.
However, there was a point I wanted to add to the useful contents of this article. It is something that occurred to me the other day as I sat at the airport waiting to board my flight to Frankfurt for the Book Fair. I was looking at the people passing by and the range of colours, sizes, physical features, dress, gestures, languages was so diverse that I thought – how can all these variations be from a common ancestor. It led me on to thinking about how we depict aliens in our literature and our films (just take Star Trek as an example) – it is rarely, if ever that a race of aliens are depicted with the wide variety of look and stature that exists in us humans – just a thought.
Chris Warren
Author and Freelance Writer
Randolph’s Challenge Book One – The Pendulum Swings
2009 Oct 29
I’m delighted you found it useful. You are right about the tendency of many authors to treat each species as a single culture, and how unlikely it is that it would actually work out that way. This issue is a bit beyond the scope of this article, but it is an excellent idea for another article. Thank you for the suggestion.