WRITING ADVICE: Creating Alien Aliens, Part 14: The Usual, the Expected, and the Totally Weird

In September of 2007, I started this blog with a bit of writing advice. A little over a year later, I discovered how little I knew about writing after hearing children’s writer, Lin Oliver speak at a convention hosted by the Minnesota Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators. Since then, I have shared (with their permission) and applied the writing wisdom of Lin Oliver, Jack McDevitt, Nathan Bransford, Mike Duran, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, SL Veihl, Bruce Bethke, and Julie Czerneda. Together they write in genres broad and deep, and have acted as agents, editors, publishers, columnists, and teachers. Since then, I figured I’ve got enough publications now that I can share some of the things I did “right”.

While I don’t write full-time, nor do I make enough money with my writing to live off of it...neither do all of the professional writers above...someone pays for and publishes ten percent of what I write. When I started this blog, that was NOT true, so I may have reached a point where my own advice is reasonably good. We shall see! Hemingway’s quote above will now remain unchanged as I work to increase my writing output and sales! As always, your comments are welcome!

Part 1: https://faithandsciencefiction.blogspot.com/2020/01/slice-of-pie-creating-alien-aliens.html
Part 2: https://faithandsciencefiction.blogspot.com/2020/02/slice-of-pie-creating-alien-aliens-part.html
Part 3: https://faithandsciencefiction.blogspot.com/2020/02/slice-of-pie-creating-alien-aliens.html
Part 4: https://faithandsciencefiction.blogspot.com/2020/04/slice-of-pie-creating-alien-aliens-part.html
Part 5: https://faithandsciencefiction.blogspot.com/2020/09/writing-advice-creating-alien-aliens.html
Part 6: https://faithandsciencefiction.blogspot.com/2021/02/writing-advice-creating-alien-aliens.html
Part 7: https://faithandsciencefiction.blogspot.com/2021/04/writing-advice-creating-alien-aliens.html
Part 8: https://faithandsciencefiction.blogspot.com/2021/05/writing-advice-creating-alien-aliens.html
Part 9: https://faithandsciencefiction.blogspot.com/2021/08/writing-advice-creating-alien-aliens.html
Part 10: https://faithandsciencefiction.blogspot.com/2021/09/writing-advice-creating-alien-aliens.html
Part 11: https://faithandsciencefiction.blogspot.com/2021/10/writing-advice-creating-alien-aliens.html
Part 12: https://faithandsciencefiction.blogspot.com/2021/12/writing-advice-creating-alien-aliens.html
Part 13: https://faithandsciencefiction.blogspot.com/2022/01/writing-advice-creating-alien-aliens.html

STAR TREK, STAR WARS, BABYLON 5, “ET The Extraterrestrial”, and countless other SciFi movies have created countless “aliens” who are obviously “humans in funny suits”:“But the real problem is not shape, it is mind. ‘Humans in funny suits’ is a well-known term in literary science-fiction fandom, and it does not refer to something with four limbs that walks upright. An angular creature of pure crystal is a ‘human in a funny suit’ if she thinks remarkably like a human - especially a human of an English-speaking culture of the late-20th/early-21st century.” (7/30/2008; Eliezer Yudkowsky, “Humans in Funny Suits”)

So how DO you create a truly alien alien? We probably can’t – at least I can’t! It’s not from lack of trying.

I actually have one alien, the WheetAh whom I’ve tried to bring to life.

In the WheetAh universe stories, Humans and WheetAh are the sole surviving sapients (I used to say “sentient”, but discovered that that only means that a creature has the “power of perception by the senses; conscious”. My cat, my dog, a crow, a turtle…these are all sentient. SAPIENT is a different word and means something entirely different: “having or showing great wisdom/sound judgment, self-awareness, (though literally, it means “to taste, have taste”); hence our species name: Homo sapiens sapiens

I’ve sold one story in this series (you can hear if podcast on CAST OF WONDERS here Part 1: https://www.castofwonders.org/2011/12/episode-20-peanut-butter-and-jellyfish-part-1-by-guy-stewart/, Part 2: https://www.castofwonders.org/2011/12/episode-21-peanut-butter-and-jellyfish-part-2-by-guy-stewart/). But I think my biggest problem is that while the WheetAh LOOK alien, they don’t ACT alien.

As I write this, I’ve started to wonder how a plant-animal sort of creature might behave if it was sapient.

Humans and the WheetAh are automatic antagonists – we call them Weeds, they call us Weasels. We eat plants, and I’m pretty sure the Human psyche would have trouble making the existential leap from “salad” to “dinner companion”.

The WheetAh are similarly handicapped – they’re carnivorous plants, related to the pitcher plant in physiology, but the size of a Saguaro Cactus. They “walk” by spinning. Their everyday life is barely comparable to a Human’s life.

For example, they reached for and attained the stars; but what path did they take to get there? Our launch into space was initially powered by one thing: war. The Chinese had invented gunpowder and fireworks, which they quickly applied to their war-making skills, (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fireworks). The science was carried west by Arab businessmen, traders, and leaders. Finally reaching Italy, France, and England, they eventually traveled over the Atlantic to the US. Every civilization on Earth used some form of fireworks…

So, would a plantimal civilization discover fireworks? Well…the Chinese discovered that bamboo, with pockets of air, when tossed into a fire, exploded with an impressive sound. WheetAh would have plenty of plants, so there’d be a good chance that they would discover that, I’ve also invented a few plants that work along the same principal as the Jack Pine, which requires fire for a seed-bearing cone to explode and release its seed.

Gunpowder was discovered and developed by Chinese, though “not their intention to create a weapon of war, Taoist alchemists continued to play a major role in gunpowder development due to their experiments with sulfur and saltpeter involved in searching for eternal life and ways to transmute one material into another.”

So, let’s postulate that the WheetAh discovered gunpowder in THIS way. The development of it would have proceeded along entirely different lines than that taken by Chinese chemists. How would that affect the “world view” regarding gunpowder? Would they have used it for war? Would they have used it to bring greater ‘light’ to the masses? Their biology would determine their use of the invention. Would its use have completely died out? Questions for me to answer.

According to Jared Diamond, in his remarkable book, GUNS, GERMS, AND STEEL, “…Europe’s colonization of Africa had nothing to do with differences between European and African peoples themselves, as white racists assume. Rather, it was due to accidents of geography and biogeography—in particular, to the continents’ different areas, axes, and suites of wild plant and animal species. That is, the different historical trajectories of Africa and Europe stem ultimately from differences in real estate.”

Perhaps the most fascinating part of Diamond’s book, is that the sole reason horses became an indelible part of Human history is that they WERE domesticable. For example, zebras, while they look like striped horses, are non-domesticable. It’s been tried many times. Boar are not domesticable. Tigers and buffalo are impossible. There’s no such thing as a domesticated elephant, either. Elephants CHOOSE to work with certain people… What if Wheet had more domesticable animals than Earth? How might that have created a WheetAh history radically different from Human history?

Would WheetAh have developed crop plants, or would their society have shaped itself around the altering of PLANTS rather than animals? Take the internal combustion engine – it changed life on Earth…but what is the power of the engine measured in? HORSE-power. How would the masterful manipulation of plants altered WheetAh society? How would it have it affected their technology, and subsequently, how would their technology changed their view of their world?

Ultimately, would Humans and WheetAh have any common ground? How would a society of mobile plantimals govern itself? What would WheetAh LAW look like? What of WheetAh “child-rearing”…would that phrase even make any sense, or would it be as alien to them as their culturing of small mammals as delicacies would feel to us (though most of us don’t seem to mind when a dog eats a rabbit…and white Humans hunted the buffalo to near extinction. Which brings up another point, would there be “races” of WheetAh? Would the word have any meaning at all to them? (I HAVE created a mountainous sub-species of WheetAh called the ruuyAh, smaller, faster, quieter that the standard WheetAh…and I haven’t even BEGUN to explore their culture! I only know that the larger WheetAh look down on the ruuyAh as the “lesser” people.

So, my problem with most of the stories I’ve tried to write about WheetAh/Human have got them thinking just like we do, only with a plantimal brain.

Hmmm…I “may” have a lot of work to do. Maybe then I can finally get my story, “By Law and Custom” off the ground…especially when I look at the “customs” of two sentients from entirely different Kingdoms…

Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Zkzzjg3h7hW5Z36hK/humans-in-funny-suits, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_gunpowder#:~:text=the%20Song%20dynasty-,Gunpowder%20formula,substance%20with%20gunpowder%2Dlike%20properties., https://ssec.si.edu/stemvisions-blog/evolution-fireworks
Image: https://aliens.fandom.com/wiki/Zistle?file=Wikipicedit.jpg