Creative creatures

As SF writers, we may think we have a complete free hand to create new creatures, but it isn't so.  The laws of physics will work the same elsewhere in the universe, and they give us the framework for, and provide the restrictions on, what we can create.

Our imagined life forms are constrained by the type of planet they live on.  What is its atmosphere like, what is the gravity there?  If the planet is smaller than Earth it will have lighter gravity and the creatures there may be able to run and leap much further than on Earth.  But the atmosphere might be thinner than a human is used to, and might cause us some problems.

Or perhaps your aliens don't live on or in a planet, but in the midst of the as-yet undiscovered dark matter that we think makes up ninety per cent off the universe.  They would be radically different creatures than planet-dwellers.  Would they eat dark matter for energy? And how would they reproduce?  Would they be swarms of microscopic beings with a group-mind?

If we're planet-bound, we have to consider the effects of evolution by natural selection on our creatures, and the principles of convergent evolution.  And when we stick to those rules it's difficult to come up with a unique creature that doesn't exist in some form on Earth, or in its waters.

Bioluminescence, parthenogenesis, electrical sensing of the environment, echolocation with natural sonar, navigation with natural magnetic compasses, thermal imaging, the use of the skeleton.  All these features are utilised by creatures on our own planet.  Raiding them, we can create unique new combinations.

Avatar's Na'vi are recognizeably humanoid, but they're ten feet tall and breathe an atmosphere slightly different from Earth's.  Anne McCaffrey's Hrrubans from the Doona books are walking big cats with language and high tech.  They characterise rank as being a "broad stripe", encompassing the wisdom of age.  The reference is to the broad stripe of contrasting colour running down the back of their fur.

In my Panthera books I've invented jagotheras, kingcats, and goldcats.  They're intended to be future versions of jaguars, cheetahs, and lions, but each has their own recogniseable habitat and markings that are based on what exists on Earth today.

It's easy for us to create exotic creatures, the skill lies in imagining the food webs, biospheres, and physical quirks of their homes that make them believable but different.

The Characters of trees

Driving through the bare deciduous woodland forest yesterday got me thinking about the nature of trees and the roles they play in our stories.

If we want the planets we design to be suitable for humans to live on they have to have some mechanism for keeping the atmosphere as we need it.  On Earth trees fill this role magnificently, taking in carbon dioxide and breathing out oxygen. We wouldn't have an atmosphere we could breathe if it wasn't for the trees and other plants that maintain it.

Thinking about convergent evolution, any planet that has a suitable atmosphere for us is likely to have some form of trees.  But rather than seeing these familiar parts of the landscape as limiting our world design, we can embrace them as characters.

Tolkien famously did this in The Lord of the Rings with Treebeard the Ent, who takes the tree as character to its extreme as he can walk about and talk.  I did something rather different in my short story The Scent of Other Lives (one of the stories in my ebook collection Otherlives).  There the trees have branches they can move like limbs, and they communicate in some kind of telepathic way.

We can use them as characters who are conspicuous by their absence, as in Sarah Crossan's Breathe.  Her story is a cautionary ecological tale about what happens when we cut all the trees down.  There the few that exist are  hidden from view and tended in ways full of ritual.  

Avatar invented a new take on the idea of trees being the witnesses to our history.  The Tree of Souls was the keeper of the Na'vi's memories, the centre of their spirituality and history.  

In my book Panthera : Death Song the trees of the rainforest become characters.  Their denseness prevents my humans from doing things, and they provide home and sustenance for the jagothera big cats.  I've tried to capture the magic of the tropical sun rising and setting through the canopy, the dark foliage silhouetting a crimson and golden sky.

As well as being the essential lungs of an ecosystem, trees can be home.  Think of the massive Hometree in Avatar, a tree so huge it was a living cathedral.  Tall trees reaching into the sky give a planet a sense of continuity.  These guardians of the atmosphere have been here for many human generations, and will last for many more to come - if we don't cut them down.

It's the law

When we're world-building for SF we're not quite as free as it might first appear.  Our world has to be built according to laws of some kind, and then we have to stick to them.  As I'm writing SF rather than fantasy, my worlds have to conform to the known laws of science.  That doesn't mean that it isn't possible to have exotic aliens, it just means I have to work much harder to justify their existence. 

In the interests of story, we generally want our human characters to be able to move about freely when they're on-planet, and that usually means putting them on a planet that's not dissimilar to earth.  But if you think that limits you too much, think Avatar.  In many respects that world was familiar.  It had jungles, an atmosphere, oceans.  But within those parameters is scope to be exotic.  The bioluminescent forest at night was an extension of the bioluminescence some plants on Earth have, but scaled up and with every plant glowing it made for an alien world.  There were horses and birds on that world too, and flying dinosaurs.  Every creature has a similar counterpart on Earth, and yet they were truly unique.  

Pandora has trees too, but while they're recognizable as such, some are much more than mere trees. In the Tree of Souls I see the form of Earth's weeping willow in its arching branches, but everything else is different.  The tree has its own form of sentience, a role as memory-keeper, something no Earth tree can do.  The Na'vi too are recogniseable.  They're a standard humanoid body form, but they're ten feet tall and much thinner in the body than humans,

The rules we set up for building our world will influence the society and culture of the people who live there.  The Na'vi live in the forest, and respect and worship the natural world.  Species who live on the ocean where there are huge creatures would most likely build up legends, and probably some kind of religion, around the creatures.

If there are several different species populating your world, each will have their own culture and moral code.  If they are organised societies they will have some form of law.  What is forbidden for them?  Are they free to choose their friends?  Or is there a strict caste system that prevents free thought?  And what happens when an outsider comes in and shows that their rules don't make sense?

Consistent biology, creature design, and laws and cultures arising out of the environment and what its people do there, allow us to tell a convincing but alien story,

Building a whole world

Yesterday I finally got back to writing Panthera : Death Plain after a week of distractions.  Although this book is set on Earth, the world I'm writing about has changed, and although I'm using familiar reference points things are different.

Earth is already overpopulated, and I've assumed that it will continue to be so even when humans  spread out over a vast amount of space.  Earth will always be the home world of humans, and there'll be many millions of us who won't leave home even when space travel is safe and relatively easy,

But I wanted to reflect some of the current environmental debates in my picture of the planet.  So I have a massive re-greening project going on at the southern edge of the desert.  These schemes are getting under way now, but I wanted to make this bigger than anything we're currently doing.

Because I have a passion for big cats I wanted to create a world in which they still have space to exist. So I have several reserves on the continent of New Africa.  But I also expected that the same issues will dog conservation as today - pressure on land for human development, poaching, ranchers killing cats who take cattle.

I've built my world in each of the three Panthera books around the story I wanted to tell.  I wanted the habitats on each world to show off the qualities of the big cats I was writing about.  But you might equally start from the other end, with a world hostile to human life and see how your characters deal with that.  World-building that way could take your characters mining gas giants, exploring ice worlds for incredibly rare and valuable metals or minerals, or terraforming a barren planet to suit their needs.  How you build your world will be shaped by the story you want to tell, but there's still scope for dazzling invention in the details.  Think Avatar and Pandora.