Furry Writers' Guild Forum

How alien is alien enough?

General Writing Discussion
#1

For more than two years I’ve been working on this rather epic story involving a conflict between the human race and a furry alien race - they are basically anthro foxes. This has led to some interesting challenges, mostly of the sort of keeping the race similar enough to be relatable to humans, but different enough to be alien and not just humans with superficial differences. If one were to think through the science, there is already the astronomically long odds that not only did an alien race evolve on another planet to have the same basic body structure as earth mammals, even to the extent of having compatible genitalia, but that in a 13.8 billion year old universe they have a technology level that is within a couple hundred years of each other. But at least that, however improbable it may be, has become a trope of mainstream science fiction, used by authors like C.J. Cherryh, Lisanne Norman, K.D. Wentworth, Larry Niven, and Anne McCaffrey, to name a few.

On the one hand, there is the concern that the differences in the race and their society may be a lot to expect a reader to keep track of in their minds as they read the story. Among these are:

[ul][li]Their brains are wired differently in how they experience different types/aspects of love, which manifests itself in the kind of community, friend, family, and sexual relationships they live in;[/li]
[li]The archetypical characteristics of males vs. females is very different from humans, to the extent that if their sex organs were not an overriding factor, it would be difficult to say which gender is male and which is female;[/li]
[li]They have a whole different timekeeping system, with a different-length day and year, with different units for their equivalent of weeks, months, hours, minutes and seconds;[/li]
[li]They’ve invented medical technology that has greatly extended their lifespan, which has virtually rewritten the concept of retirement, changed their outlook on youth vs. maturity, the nature of relationships between older and younger, and has been a major contributing factor to ecological difficulties;[/li]
[li](And now for something furry…) Scents and scent marking play an important role in nonverbal communication and interpersonal relations.[/li][/ul]

On the other hand, they have a lot of similarities to human society that leave me wondering if it strains believability that an alien society would be that much like.

[ul][li]Their homes, cities, transportation, and communication systems are all similar;[/li]
[li]They work jobs, sleep by night, and spend time with their version of families much like in human society;[/li]
[li]They are led by politicians who are often corrupt and game the system for special interests;[/li]
[li]The types of entertainment media, including movies, shows, music, and games, and news media, are a lot like ours.[/li][/ul]

Admittedly, some of this could be chalked up to laziness, in that I haven’t spent a lot of time thinking about how some of these things could be different (and how those differences might manifest themselves in the narrative) but with some it’s not immediately obvious how they would be different or why they would need to be.

So there’s the dilemma, too alien vs. not alien enough. Beyond a certain point, making an alien society too alien just adds complexity to the story without adding to its enjoyability, and at the end of the day, I’m trying to write a story that will entertain readers, not write a case-study in non-Euclidean geometry.

(And to those of you who have seen my Taboo story, Aid and Comfort, yes, it is the vidran of whom I speak here.)

StormKitty

#2

How alien you want to be depends on how loosely you want people to be connected to your furry race. For instance, in drawing bilateral symmetry makes us feel loosely connected to our pets and close relatives. They look like and sometimes behave like people. But in our distant relatives, such as flies, spiders, and crabs, it serves as a point of contention, unsettling us to know that we are in some way related.

I’m taking it that you’re looking for a sweet spot, wherein the characters you portray are relatable for the human conflicts and emotions they face, but very /different/ in many other ways, giving your race abilities and concepts that are not naturally found in humans (such as potent smell and differently structured sex systems). In my opinion, these differences and abilities will make your race more interesting and separate it from human concepts (except in a way that can be understood with minor explanation).

Where you really get /too alien/ is when you start including things that are not /particularly pleasing/. Humans are keyed to central concepts such as symmetry and aesthetics, politeness and peaceful attitude, and common psychological feelings such as love or emotion. When you start stripping these things out of your race, you will undoubtedly raise ire toward them in your audience, no matter how hard you push to have them be the main character. For instance, your concept of having scent be an important part of your alien race’s characterization is really cool. Your characters could notice perfumes or pheromones in the air very well. However, if you graphically detail a character marking or sniffing another character’s butt I might lose my lunch.

A lot of the time, I use the old adage: “Ask what your mother would think” and if you think she would not accept this alien race as a friend (or are otherwise way to embarrassed to tell her) then you might be dealing with something that’s a little too alien.

As a biologist, my opinion is that ugly things are cool. But when I’m working to save a rainforest, I’m not going to stick a picture of a spider on my logo. You put a big fat loveable panda bear on that because humans like big fat lovable things more than they like alien things. If you want your characters to be relatable, find some way to make humans think they’re big fat lovable things and you’ll be golden.

#3

Oh, hello! I liked your story!

We need some kind of common ground with the aliens, or we won’t find them interesting or sympathetic. I think this is especially true if you’re writing war; one of the tropes of war fiction is that the Bad Guys turn out to be, after all, not too different from us.

For ‘how alien is alien enough’, I like this quote from Isaac Asimov, from the foreword to Nightfall:

We could have told you that our character paused to strap on his quonglishes before setting out on a walk of seven vorks along the main gleebish of his native znoob, and everything would have seemed ever so much more thoroughly alien. But it also would have been ever so much more difficult to make sense out of what we were saying, and that did not seem useful.
#4

I agree with the ‘people have to be able to relate to it’ viewpoint. (well, that’s IF you want them to relate to the aliens)

By their very natures, aliens of any strips and such are going to have vastly different viewpoints than people. A lot of things we deal with in our world are because of how we are shaped physically as well as how our brain works.

Take an alien with three fingers and a thumb. There is a good chance their number system will be based off of 4s and 8s rather than 5s and 10s. Einstein has shown that such number systems are valid, and in no ways different than ours, but if one of these aliens were to talk to us about numbers, it would be difficult for us to understand them.

Really, in the end, it all depends on how alien you want them to be. :stuck_out_tongue:

#5

Related, it’s important to consider the homeworld from which they originate and the way their physiology and language would have developed as a result.

For example, a species originating from a planet with very strong gravity, where a fall from most any height would likely prove injurious or fatal, would have vastly different spatial constructs in their languages…to them, the phrase “He was in a high position” would suggest that the subject was in a precarious and undesirable situation, not a place of authority. Alternately, the sapient plants from planet Pikes might take “had his head in the sand” to mean that the subject exhibited good common sense, or that he was thirsty. Even if a word-for-word translation was possible, the end result could well end up being nonsensical for reasons such as this.

But to get on-topic, yeah, as others have said, it depends on what you want to do. Stanislaw Lem’s aliens are…alien, not relatable to human beings at all, yet his works have proven to be quite popular. So, aliens don’t need to be relatable to the reader for a work to be successful either commercially or artistically. Perhaps a better question would be, “How interesting can you make them?”

#6

Thanks to all for the replies so far. The story setting in question is far enough along at this point that it’s for practical purposes too late to make major changes but there is still room to make minor adjustments, both retroactively in the unreleased material and the foregoing. At least now I feel more confident that the approach I’m taking is workable and won’t alienate readers (if you’ll pardon the expression).

Oddly enough, the underlying idea started out as little more than a couple of erotica tropes that expanded to the point where I felt the need to make it more plausible. To put it another way, I was trying to write an erotic story and got sidetracked by things like plot, character development, and world building. This isn’t the first time that’s happened in my writing.

By the way, the concept of numeric systems other than base-10 are a lot older than Einstein. The Babylonians used a base-60 numbering system and other past societies have used base-12, base-20 and others.