For that matter.. it occurred to me recently that Stephenie Meyer’s vampires have almost as many similarities to traditional elves as they do to traditional vampires. I can’t say I feel good about them, but hey – she got them published..

He could have written things like, “Sjovu got into his ghunap and fergryted eighteen plajiks to the nearest gyjurk”. But no one would have known what he was talking about. I believe that unless you’re writing as series of books using the same alien races, one can’t diverge from our own cliches and idiosyncrasys too much, lest we lose the reader. Asimov used english terms the whole way. (He explaines why in his forward).

One way of teaching the reader about the cliches and idiosyncrasys of an alien race, is to have a human character who’s new to the planet. Then we learn things as he learns them. Only thats a bit too cliched for me. Maybe you guys can come up with a better way.

In the book I am working on I have this race I made up that is very much like humans but only what humans know about them is revealed. They are not at all what they seem or what the human characters think of them but you only hear about them and see them from a human perspective. Then there is another race which has only one character of and you learn next to nothing about this race.

Actually, my biggest complaint regarding non-human races is that, almost without exception, they aren’t. Non-human that is. All humans belong to one species, and cultural differances along often make it so that we don’t understand what another person is thinking when they do something. However, under the cultural (software) differances, we’ve mostly got the same drives and motivations, thanks to millions of years of evolution and or the divine beings of choice (hardware). Non-humans aren’t just running differant software – they are also operating on differant hardware.

You talked a lot about startrek aliens, but sort of missed the fact that virtually all star trek aliens are essentially indistinguishable from humans if you close your eyes. They are each just humans with one personality trait at a stronger than normal level – for a fairly typcial middle class american.

CJCherryh’s Atevi are a good example of this handled right. The Atevi are very similar to humans psychologically… close enough to make them mostly understandable, to make them characters you can care about. But there’s that one giant, glaring differance that resulted in a war, and a complete legal embargo on any sort of inter-racial contact except through the office of a single very highly trained human interpreter. And it’s not something like religious beliefs… it’s fundamental emotional drives of the two races.

Maybe Brandon just thinks of even his non-human characters as human?

But for the most part: no more Tolkien, please. I just got started on a novel with a half-human main character. First person should help to really bind the reader to that rather unique viewpoint, I hope.

http://mbarker.livejournal.com/101489.html

There you are, Howard. Snarkiness from Boise, ID.

An alien race, if done right, can be a huge draw to a story. For example, Brandon’s Kandra point of view in HERO OF AGES is one of the most enjoyable parts of that book.

However, I want to suggest that aliens (in fantasy or sf) create that draw only IF they’re kept sufficiently strange or mysterious. The minute they become common or too human, they lose their power to enchant.

That’s one thing I like about how Tolkien did the elves and orcs–we never got the National Geographic on them. They never became common. And so I always wanted to know more. Easterlings, ents, balrogs, the orders of wizards, dragons, etc. were the same. There were tons of tales Tolkien hinted at, curioisties raised, but those desires were never sated. This is part of what drove me to other fantasy books.

It’s the same thing that made me love mammoths and dinosaurs, bats and giant squid, and far-off places. However, once these things became common and explained, their magic departed. The curiosity generated by the wonder of things new is one of the key things science fiction and fantasy offer its readers. But I think authors can only keep it alive if they approach it in the same way a fan dancer approaches her work.

This leads me to another point. It’s true that focusing our world building on the conflicts and story touch points can keep us on track. And we do need to produce. However, I think if we strictly limit our alien development to the central story conflicts, we might miss many opportunities for that wonder. Some of what we develop might end up complicating the plot while other parts might only enrich the experience.

For example, one of the most poignant parts of the LOTR, of which there were many, was the tale of the ents and the entwives and Treebeard’s poem. Tolkien could have eliminated that and the story never would have been affected. But, O, how much richer the story was for that little side trail that still beckons. Or you might think of the ring Bilbo found. When Tolkien first wrote it, it wasn’t THE ring of power. It was merely a ring that Gollum used. Only later, when he began to work on LOTR and was trying to figure out the main problem of the story did he work that detail into it becoming THE ring of power.

What I did was find ways to make fun of the cliches. For instance, my three-foot tall elves have Tolkien-elf envy. Something else that I have been doing to make my races different is to pull ideas from mythology and fairy tales, not from the typical fantasy genre.

I don’t write nonhuman characters at all. I had a bad experience with some aliens in a space opera I tried to write that led to me swearing not to do them again, at least for a time.