Cover courtesy of Goodreads.
I was impressed by David Brin’s eight, very distinct sapient species in Brightness Reef. I’ve also heard that C.J. Cherryh does a wonderful alien, and I intend to read Foreigner very soon. On the nonfiction side, I picked up Stanley Schmidt’s Aliens and Alien Societies for some tips.
The book was a decent overview, and I managed to pull together a further-reading list from the bibliography, based off my interests. It looks like I need to find a way to acquire back issues of Analog. [update: Mwahaha the University library has access to the e-journal. I am set!]
On Reproduction (p. 93)
Two sexes are enough to confer large evolutionary advantages, but some evolutionary lines may have more … On the other hand, some Earthly animals evolved from sexual ancestors have found ways to reproduce parthenogenetically–there are entire species of lizards whose members are all identical females.
My main alien character is female, but I pondered sex and pronouns quite a bit, and out of general interest I want to check out this article:
- Cueller, O., “Animal Parthenogenesis,” Science, Aug 26, 1977
On Really Big Civilizations (p. 131-135)
In addition to aliens, I’m using hyperspace to get my characters from point A to point B, with permanent jump stations modeled after Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan Saga: each gate leads to a specific destination and you need a spaceship to go through it. Clearly, I have a strong interest in interstellar travel.
- Zubrin, Robert M., “The Magnetic Sail,” Analog, May 1992.
- Arnold, Roger, and Donald Kingsbury, “The Spaceport,” Analog, Nov/Dec 1979.
- Barlowe, Meacham, and Summers, Barlowe’s Guide to Extraterrestrials, Workman, 1979.
- Mallove and Matloff’s The Starflight Handbook, Wiley, 1989.
- Forward, Robert L., “Faster Than Light,” Analog, March 1995.
On religions and sciences (p. 114-117)
It seems fairly safe to say, though, that most [human] religions include rituals related to a belief in one or more powers higher than human, stories to explain the origins of world and life, and teachings aimed at inculcating and perpetuating a model code.
Good reminder! I need to do more worldbuilding on my alien religion.
On trade (p. 119-120)
- Salomon, Warren, “The economics of interstellar commerce,” Analog, May 1989.
- Barnes, John, “How to build a future,” Analog, March, 1990.
On custom, etiquette, social pressure, morality (p. 122-123)
Many social dictates of acceptable behavior involve such areas as reproduction (a society must control fighting over potential mates, ensure that children are raised acceptably, and so forth), eating and elimination … To make alien cultures live and breathe, you will want to give ample attention to details of custom, gesture, morality, and clothing; and you will want all of these things to grow out of your particular aliens’ nature and background.”
Schmidt recommends the novels of C.J. Cherryh for her skillful use of gesture and nuance to distinguish alien from human and alien from alien. On a related note, author N.K. Jemison recently wrote a blog post on worldbuilding and profanity.
What are your favorite aliens in fiction?
Orson Scott Card’s Speaker for the Dead has interesting aliens. I also love Niven and Pournelle’s aliens in A Mote in God’s Eye. I haven’t read Vernor Vinge’s A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky (yet), but several people whose opinions I trust have reported that the aliens in that are incredibly well done.
There are so many! Good luck!
Thank you, Jak! Good call on Speaker for the Dead; I forgot about that one. I haven’t read Vinge (he’s been on my to-read pile for a while). Honestly, I didn’t even realize A Fire Upon the Deep was well-regarded specifically for its aliens, so I’m going to have to bump that one up to the top of the queue. Great recs!
Best aliens I’ve seen in ages were in Eleanor Arnason’s A Woman of the Iron People. Lots of good gender stuff, lots of good social stuff. And ditto Jak on the aliens in Fire Upon the Deep for sheer alien-ness.
Whoa, I’m entirely unfamiliar with the author. Awesome, I love checking new stuff out. Thanks Tucker!
CF Friedman has some good aliens– I’d recommend The Madness Season in particular.
Thirding Fire Upon the Deep, though with the caveat that I actually sent it back to the library half-way through because it was a little too high-stakes for me. But with a whole lot of interesting alien variety, definitely.
If you haven’t read Rosemary Kirstein’s Steerswoman books, she has a neat take on aliens & alien worlds, though it’s the third book that’s really about that, and I wouldn’t recommend taking them out of order.
In treading the line between human & alien, there’s Joan D. Vinge’s Psion/Catspaw/Dreamfall series, where the main character is half human and half alien; the first two are more identity as a psyonic half-breed among humans, and the third about relating to full-blood aliens about whose culture he knows almost nothing.
Also, did you catch the “how to write about hermaphrodite sex” article on io9 a while back? (here: http://io9.com/5939725/how-to-write-about-hermaphrodite-sex) And if you’re interested in alternate gender-expression and mating models from modern creatures, there’s a book called Evolution’s Rainbow: Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People that’s got some really interesting bits in. I found it a little frustrating because the author is a transgender biologist who was more interested in complaining about how most biologists from Darwin onward normalize their observations to their preconceived notions of how gender works than in telling me all the cool bits about what other species actually *do,* but it does have a whole bunch of interesting stuff in.
Thanks, Ann! I am LOVING these recommendations.
Good reminder on the io9 article. I emailed it to myself to read later, but then pushed in down in my inbox once I caught my boss smirking at the prominently displayed subject line “How to write about hermaphrodite sex” during a meeting. As a result, I never got around to reading the original article. Will certainly do that now!
Have another recommendation to toss in the hat. Check out the Oankali in Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis (Lilith’s Brood) series.
::Adds Butler to the list:: Woot! Thanks, Ronnie.