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

Finding the alien at home

If you're designing alien creatures for your stories there's no better place to start than on good old planet Earth.

If you're going to set your action on a planet that humans can exist on that means it's going to contain creatures facing similar challenges to Earth's species.  And if we employ the principle of convergent evolution - i.e. the same challenges force the same sets of solutions to the challenge - we end up with creatures we might recognize on Earth.

Does that mean our aliens don't look alien?  Not at all.  Take a look at any film of deep sea creatures. In that place of perpetual darkness beyond the reach of the sun there are myriad strange and glo wing  forms.  There are creatures with translucent bodies and bioluminescence, pulsing with waves of green and blue colour as they swim.  There are fish with bioluminescent fishing rods on their heads to lure in prey.

We used to think nothing could exist without sunlight to power its body, but then we discovered black smokers on the ocean floor and their colonies of creatures.  Tube worms, shrimps, and a host of other creatures get along just fine at atmospheric pressures that would crush us, getting energy from the heat and minerals ejected by the smokers from the Earth's core.

Take a look at individual animals' senses.  There are animals who can sense the  temperature of the earth so accurately they can keep the temperature of a nest constant.  Snakes can effectively 'see' with heat sensors that can detect infra-red emissions.  Plants and animals can predict the weather.

Green tree frogs croak when rain is approaching.  Some plants only open their flowers in fine weather, and some track the sun across the sky. Infrasound and ultrasound extend hearing way beyond the human range.

In addition to the senses we use there are creatures who can sense the Earth's magnetic field, plants that can tell the time, creatures that use the sun as a compass.  All animals can sense the seasons, vital if they're to breed at the right time of year.

The amount of variation in Earth species is stunning and staggering, and anyone wanting to create an alien species would have enough examples to last several lifetimes.