Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="s/LaSH" data-source="post: 953244" data-attributes="member: 6929">I think survival is the most recognisable trait, and one that divides the rock from the brain - a rock won't do things to survive, whereas life generally will (if it doesn't it won't live long).Going from first principles is always a good idea - it not only gives you a biological basis for weird aliens, but it gives you other species for their homeworld and everyday life as well. More about pets in a moment.Going from biology, you can find plenty of things that a race needs to 'take care of' to survive. To use examples from my homebrew universe, the eaxhr (YASH-er) have three genders, two of whom bond to create a family unit while the third is only peripherally involved in breeding and who live in huge bunkhouses. Oh, and they melt in water, but that's not important. What's important is that there are these big, scaly, muscly insect creatures* who have 'feminine' family units but also have these big collections of 'males' (the technical word is Makers) who live together in the hundreds.* I know insects shouldn't have big muscles, or even get bigger than a grapefruit. Eaxhr are technically superinsects, evolutionarily about as far from insects as we are from fish, so their exoskeleton is subsumed and they have lungs of a sort, although their tissue holds a lot of the chlorine they breathe, allowing eaxhr to hold their breath up to an hour. They haven't shown much interest in calling vertebrates 'fish people', though. Chalk it up to a long and rich history on the intergalactic scene.Then there's the ability to go beyond evolution. Given time, there will be genetically or otherwise engineered variant races popping up all over the place. These are races** that demonstrate clearer function than evolved ones.** I know 'race' generally isn't used for sf, but it's the best label I've come up with because certain civilisations such as the T-kin aren't a species at all, but rather a sophisticated kind of conglomerate of many different species of fungus.Most importantly, however, races that can voyage between the stars (and thus interact with humans on any meaningful level beyond 'Me Kirk, you monster, blam argh thud, poor devil doesn't know a phaser does he?') have developed a few things that humans can recognise and interact with. For starters, they have moving bodies (sometimes only their ship moves, but that's enough). That's generally a dead giveaway. Second, they act with self-preservation (possibly on a social scale, not individual, however). Self-preservation is a good commiseration point, incidentally.When I write aliens, I make it a point to include motivations even if I won't write from their perspective. Even the malicious xre'ron hordes (genetically engineered amphibian soldiers with animal intelligence) have motives; they're animalistic, with just enough intelligence to know hate, thus making them the perfect shock soldiers. An example interaction with these soldiers involves fang-baring, impressive posturing, and various submissive behaviours. The primary difference here is that xrer soldiers (ron) don't have wants, they have behaviours. They won't say 'I want such-and-such', they'll say 'Kill! Kill!'.I'm rambling. Does any of this make sense?</blockquote>

Verification