“When Your Aliens are Too Alien”

I’m about halfway through my next Johnny Winger novel (Johnny Winger and the Battle at Caloris Basin) and it looks like I may have written myself into a corner.

In this last episode of Tales of the Quantum Corps, Winger has become a disassembled swarm of nanobots, what I have termed an ‘angel’ in previous books.  The deconstruction occurred in the previous novel (Johnny Winger and the Europa Quandary).  Now, I have to tell the story of what it’s like to be a cloud of bots no bigger than atoms, a cloud that can form simulations of human beings and just about any imaginable physical structure.

I may have made my main character a bit too alien.

Writing a story about someone who is so different from you and me is stretching my descriptive and story-telling abilities.  On the one hand, I want to accurately describe what it’s like for Winger to be an angel.  I want to describe it in ways a human reader can understand, so out of necessity, I use a lot of analogies and a lot of “it’s kind of like this—“text.  Winger himself struggles to put his experience into words, often drawing on things he remembers from his former life as a ‘single-configuration being,” even from childhood.

There are a lot of guidelines on creating believable aliens in science fiction stories.  Johnny Winger is not intended as an alien but the effect is the same.  One writer, Veronica Sicoe, did a blog post I saw on 13 aspects about aliens you shouldn’t ignore…here’s an excerpt…

If you want to write sci-fi, or even if you’re just a curious reader, there are a handful of screwy aspects about aliens that you need to watch out for. So here’s where it’s at.

1. Aliens should be alien
If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, you can call it Rakumph all you want, it’s still an effing duck. Giving creatures fancy names and changing their color doesn’t make them alien. If you’re on an alien planet that has purple skies, three moons and something else than oxygen floating around, you can bet your dog’s chewbone all creatures will be completely different than on Earth. Different chemistry > different environment > different evolution of life. Don’t strap a funny costume on a donkey and call it a fearsome Sharzahkrath. That’s just lazy worldbuilding.

2. Aliens aren’t humans in rubber costumes
Humanoids? Really? You think the whole universe is populated by humans with wrinkly foreheads or an extra tit? Come on! Hollywood resorted to humanoid aliens because it’s cheaper to stuff an actor into a costume than to build a whole alien from scratch. As a fiction writer, you’re not limited by a production budget. Go wild! Go freakishly inhumanly outrageously alien and stun the wits out of your readers.

3. Aliens have their own history
Maybe they never had a war on their planet; maybe they’ve always viewed both (or all three?) sexes equally; maybe they make art out of living creatures and eat their elder in annual festive rituals. Alien creatures will have alien–as in unfamiliar–societies and hence a very different history. They might have evolved from fungi and still reproduce through spores, each female spawning 10,000 young every three and a half cycles, who knows, but this would greatly affect their entire history, don’t you think?

4. If they were smart enough to fly to Earth, they probably know your butthole is not the most interesting part of your body
Aliens that come all this way to abduct people and stick probes up their bums must be retarded. We’d be invaded by morons who got kicked out of their own society for shaming their ancestors. Why in the name of Planet Shmurp would they go there? To learn the secrets of our race?

5. Aliens that are naturally telepathic won’t even grasp the concept of language
Humans have developed language because there was no other direct way to communicate. If an alien race is naturally telepathic, they will never have developed language. That has huge implications! No language means no words to describe things, no symbols to represent experiences, and no written signs either. They would be absolutely unable to grasp the concept of language, let alone learn it. Your human characters will never be able to communicate with such aliens in any simple way, because even if the telepaths could to tap into your thoughts, they won’t understand them. We think in words, we think in describable concepts, we think in relations that make sense in our language-dominated sense of reality. An alien that has never felt the need to name a thing, simply won’t understand us.

6. Aliens that can’t hold a tool won’t invent space ships
Space faring slugs? Highly technological fish-like creatures? How the hell did they come up with buttons if they don’t have hands? How would they have felt the need for tools if they have no possibility to grasp them? How did they weld metal or shape a console if they can’t even hold a screwdriver? Think a bit about this one before you put such nonsense on paper.

And this one…very important.

10. Aliens are subject to the same laws of physics as we are
Unless you’re writing about converging dimensions, which would make it fantasy not science-fiction in my opinion—but that’s an entirely different debate (read: stay tuned for more)—your alien races will be subject to the same basic universal laws of physics as we are, like gravity, electricity, the laws of movement and so on. If you throw an alien down the well, he will fall down not float upwards. If you ram a fist into his face, he will budge (unless he weighs ten tons, in which case you’d better get the fuck out of there fast).

My predicament as a story-teller is how to describe the living experience of a being who is a loose collection of atoms surrounding a processor that can organize that collection into just about any form you can imagine.  This being (Johnny Winger) experiences things like Brownian motion and van der Waals forces that are so far beyond your and my thinking that words are hard to find.

In the next post to The Word Shed, on November 21, I’ll delve into how science fiction writers describe such alien experiences in ways that make you think you’re actually there.

See you November 21.

Phil B.