Sapient alien species balancing act...

Hey guys, I'm having trouble creating alien species for this sci-fi thing I'm (thinking about) doing, and I hope you guys can help me out.

Basically, I'm not sure how to strike a good balance between giving my aliens fun, recognizable personalities and making them... Well, really cool and alien. I keep thinking back to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, where all but two of the characters are aliens but they're all so "human" that it never really matters. The focus is always on their personality and narrative function.

I kind of want to do something like that, but I also want that gee-whiz factor of seeing crazy alien creatures milling about and interacting with humans. The problem is, I fear making the aliens "too alien" makes them harder to relate to, or that their alienness might beg some questions I may not be prepared to answer (i.e. about their history, culture, psychological differences from humans, etc).

Can someone give me some advice?

Different moral sets is actually a really easy way to work with this. Cultural morals on Earth tend to have certain common details, alien traditions should be largely different and have them react to our morals much like how we'd react to theirs. Confusion.

An author typically does that by having the character act normally human 80% of the time, but then suddenly they say or do something totally out of left field, and that emphasizes the alieness of them.

Comparation also work as well, in steven universe the gem(who are space rock aliens) sometiems make coment about some things like growing plants which they dont get that well, in this case you can use and analogy for them.

In Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels, the Dwarves are accustomed to living entirely underground, and use terminology and slang very different from what surface-dwellers would say. For example: "high" and "low" have opposite connotations, since they esteem depths rather than heights. Thus, their chief ruler is referred to as "the Low King," and they have several dozen different words for "dark" (much like the urban legend of Eskimos having lots of words for "snow," without which their conversation would get pretty monotonous.)

This post makes me think of an Invincible comic I read recently. Mark's on an alien planet and comes across an alien girl-child who seems to need help getting her alien cat out of an alien tree. Classic, especially for superhero comics, right? However, once the cat-thing is in the alien-girl's hands, she takes a huge bite out of it, saying "Thanks. These things are EXPENSIVE." This leaves Mark pretty disturbed. His expectations were thrown for a loop. That little illustration might not be pertinent to your question, but it's worth thinking about the similarities which make the discrepancies so off-putting. We all want basic things, like food, water, etc., and then sometimes these priorities get shuffled around from group to group. Orson Scott Card's Speaker For The Dead comes to mind. Good luck on your aliens!

There's nothing more alien than being alien in a place that you don't recognize and don't understand. I'd say... 70% of those stories are written by people who have never been to a place where they can't speak the local language and certainly don't have a phrasebook. Emphasizing the occasional alien-ness over commonality is the bread and butter of right-wing talk radio/web news.

Never mind that, what about us being able to eat alien food and vice-versa? I mean they can usually get away with that sort of thing in Stargate because most of the aliens are human, or close enough (as in the case of Jaffa) that it wouldn't usually matter, but Star Trek doesn't have that excuse.

Mind you, for interspecies relations, language is an issue, especially if said language uses a system (like pheromones) that is unintellgible to us without very specialised assistance.

Overcoming the language barrier wod seem easier than overcoming the protein barrier (as in, being composed of different protiens, and then eating their food).

If you need a bloodhound's nose to overcome the language divide, maybe not.

Just need a device that translates chemicals to text.

That is, once you've figured out which chemicals you're picking up are relevant and which aren't. It's be embarrassing after all to screw up a diplomatic situation because your little device told you the other guys were sweating with nervousness when they were actually annoyed at the high temperature. All things considered, it'd probably be easier to grow alien food (of which you'd probably have plenty of samples) than understand some alien languages.

In the case of one of my aliens, they use pheromones to denote emotional states (but actual information is still delivered audibly), which effectively means you'd need an AI to properly translate their language.

edited 31st Jan '17 6:46:41 PM by MattII

This looks like an interesting topic. So far, most of my "main" aliens have been pretty human-like, at least mentally, but I like to play around with different quirks to create subtle (or not) differences.

Among other things, many of them have a hard time speaking each other's languages even if they understand them (Mroothan mandible-clicks and guttural "glorp" sounds are difficult to replicate with a Cravyn mouth and vocal chords, for example) and either rely on a Han/Chewie type solution, or use voice synthesizers.

Mass Effect didn't make things as complicated as a translator for pheromones or such: the aliens with the specialized communication just started putting other words in front of their sentences to indicate meaning. Example "Emphatic: This thing sucks."

Amused: The Elcor were hilarious.

Which was pretty much the way I solved it with my aliens, because we can't pick up their pheromones (which they use to indicate emotion), and they are virtually unable to differentiate tones of voice. Things are further complicated because there are sounds in our language they can't hear, and sounds in spoken part of their language which sounds virtually identical to our ears, but are actually fairly different.

An interesting tidbit I picked up from a documentary was that if multiple aliens existed that there would be a distribution pattern of cycles going from human-ish, kind of human, non-human, and vice versa.

kind of like if you have an arbitrary large numbers quarters and are looking for the pattern head-head-tail-head-tail there is some complicated math that says that each matching pattern is so-in-so distance away as well as each almost matching pattern.

Which would be interesting to see if it works out since the universe is so big such cosmic mathematics might be a recognizable pattern complicated by everything moving, the lifetime of civilizations, and what not mind ye.

Anyway, my advice would be to have multiple aliens in the story and to switch up the POV every once in a while.