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.