Fantasy and Science Fiction Writing

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?

Very Early Earth and the Origin of Life

Earth is our one and only known example of a planet that has supported life and continues to do so. Long may life here continue…

We don’t know for certain where life started. It may have begun at hydrothermal vents deep in the ocean, in a small warm pond at the ocean’s edge, or in rocks deep below earth’s crust.

The vast majority of earth’s ecosystems are based directly off sunlight. The amount of energy received from the sun has gradually been increasing but the temperature of the planet does not appear to have done so in sync with the amount of solar energy received. Carbon dioxide levels and oxygen levels have changed enormously.

It is perfectly possible to have entire ecosystems where the energy source is not the sun. Certain chemical reactions are used as an energy source by some micro-organisms. These reactions can occur in the absence of sunlight. For example, hydrogen sulfide is used as an energy source by certain micro-organisms, most famously those living in hydrothermal vents in the deep ocean.

The Arrival of  Oxygen on Early Earth

There was very little free oxygen in the atmosphere of early Earth. Life was an anaerobic activity which means it happened without using oxygen. Oxygen is actually a potent toxin to most organisms evolved to live without it. While some organisms at this time used photosynthesis, the method they used did not produce oxygen as a byproduct. This meant oxygen did not build up in the atmosphere.

Then cyanobacteria evolved, flourished, and caused the release of large amounts of oxygen into the earth’s atmosphere. Many of the life forms on Earth at the time were poisoned by the oxygen. These went extinct or  became restricted to environments in which oxygen is scarce or nonexistent such as the black mud in mud flats or on the bottom of some lakes.

Evolution of Multicellular Life

With all of this oxygen available, organisms that required oxygen evolved. These are called aerobic organisms. These organisms not only could survive with oxygen present but died without it. It is believed that aerobic metabolisms were necessary for complex animal life to evolve because aerobic metabolism is more efficient and produces more energy for the organism. Scientists believe that it is this that allowed the first multicellular organisms to evolve.

Implications for the Science Fiction Writer

Of course, it’s possible that they could be wrong. With only the one planet to study, it’s very hard to make generalizations. Perhaps if oxygen-producing photosynthesis had not evolved on Earth, multicellular organisms based on some other chemical pathway would have evolved and survived. Perhaps there are others out there that never evolved on Earth that are even more efficient. However, it does suggest that for complex alien life oxygen-based metabolisms and oxygen-producing photosynthesis is a good place to start.

It may well be that on many planets oxygen-producing photosynthesis never evolved and nor did complex multicellular life, so microbe-only ecosystems on a planet with an oxygen-poor atmosphere are an excellent and likely setting. You can also use the widest number of energy sources and the harshest conditions if you are only dealing with microbes.

It seems the more complex life gets, the more delicate it is. This is a bit frustrating when writing science fiction, as most of the memorable aliens imagined are not microbes. Of course, science fiction is fiction and the balance you strike between fantasy and fact will be different for each writer, and probably for each story you write.

The main problem with creating imaginary worlds with alien life is that we have a grand total of one planet known to bear life. It is terribly hard to generalize from only one data point… and from a scientific perspective it’s a very bad idea. As a science fiction writer, you have much more freedom to take a possibility and run with it. While Mars may or may not contain living or formerly living microbes, its geological history can give useful insight into conditions on a planet other than Earth where life could possibly have evolved.

The Life and Death of Mars

Early Mars is believed to have had significant water for well over one billion years. It is perfectly possible that life could have evolved there. We won’t know for certain until a lot more experiments are done but it’s perfectly reasonable to use a Mars-like planet where life evolves as the setting for your science fiction.

The Death? of Mars and the Importance of Plate Tectonics

What happened to Mars is that plate tectonics stopped, reducing the cycling of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. This caused the atmosphere to thin, Mars’ temperature to drop, and its remaining water to freeze, although new evidence (muddy splashes on the Phoenix lander) suggests some extremely briny water probably exists in certain areas for part of the year.  There is speculation that the trace amounts of methane in the planet’s atmosphere may be caused by microbes living underground, but there certainly isn’t much in the way of an obvious biosphere.

The loss of internal heat and plate tectonics is something that is believed to happen more frequently with smaller planetary objects than with large ones. However, in the case of moons orbiting gas giants, the moons’ interiors may remain liquid and continue to produce magnetic fields and geological activity even on much smaller bodies than Mars. This can be clearly seen with the inner moons of Jupiter.

There may also be too much tectonic activity. This may be the case with Io, which is the most geologically active object in the solar system and keeps ejecting its volatiles into space.

Mars-like Planets as a Home for Intelligent Life

There is a problem with using a Mars-like planet as a home world for an alien race that evolved there: the time required to evolve an intelligent organism. It may be possible for an intelligent organism to evolve and create technology sufficient to leave the planet before a biosphere without plate tectonics becomes unable to support complex life, but we really don’t know enough to say. We need more data…

While it might be unlikely for intelligent life to evolve on a planet like Mars, such a planet would make a wonderful colony world for aliens that have managed to leave their home planets.

What this Means to the Writer

Mars-like planets with liquid water and brimming with life can be used by the science fiction writer and be perfectly accurate. As home worlds for space-faring alien races they should be used with caution with regard to their ability to support life for long periods of time. Since we only have one example of a Mars to study, you have plenty of room to maneuver within what is known.

More information on past and present Martian conditions can be found at Marstoday.com and Spaceref.com. Information on Io can be found at planetaryexploration.net