Sensing the alien

Following on from last week's blog post on aliens, this week I'm back to editing my novel Genehunter.  One of the main characters in that story is Yull, an Ur-Vai leader.  The Ur-Vai are zebra-sized big cats, with the solidity of a lion.  As well as their four legs, they also have two arms and hands.

This is a rewrite of the novel, and I'm trying to deepen Yull's character.  One of the things I realised early on is that I'd totally missed references to his sense of smell.  But Yull is a cat, and I realised his sense of smell would be much stronger than humans'.  He will be able to scent things the human characters can't smell at all.   And when he is introduced to human tech, that will have strange scents to him too.

So I'm now rewriting all of Yulł's chapters to add details about how the world around him smells.  I've decided he can scent each individual Ur-Vai emotion.  This is going to come in handy when he has to decide who is friend and foe later on in the novel.  And I've realised that the scents of the humans, and their technology, will be totally unknown to him.  He's put in the position of trying to build a friendship with humans without having all his usual scent clues to help him.  I'm writing in his sense of dislocation and disorientation this unfamiliar task brings to him.

I haven't mentioned the cats' sight in detail, but I've decided they see in full colour.  I'm cheating, because I've had them retain the tapetum lucidum, that reflective layer of cells cats have that help them to see better than us in the dark.  Cats can see up to eight times better than us with these cells, but the trade-off is that they don't see full colour,  I've been greedy.  I wanted the Ur-Vai to see in full colour as well.  I'm sure evolution can design an adaptation that will allow that.  I reasoned that the cats are tech builders and users, and they might need to see in full colour in order to use their tech safely.  

Because the cats have hands I've been able to work in a little of their sense of touch too.  At one point in the story Yull comforts Aris.  I've had him stroking her hair, and observing how different its texture is to Ur-Vai manes. By twisting around familiar senses, I've managed to make Yull unique.

Wendy Metcalfe is the author of Panthera : Death Spiral and Panthera : Death Song, and the short story collection Otherlives.  Find out more at www.wendymetcalfe.com