Eastercon Blog-A-Day 1: writing aliens

Why is it so difficult to write believable Aliens?

Firstly, I'm aware that this should have been prepared yesterday and that, technically, today is day 2 of the EightSquared Eastercon 2013. But, well, anyone who's been to a con knows what day one is like. 'nuff said.

Anyway, this Eastercon is no different from most in that they feature a program stream for writers, and day one had a panel discussion on that writers' bugbear of characterization. This is something non-trivial and deserves a post or many on it's own, but I'm going to leave you to do that research for yourselves. In very brief, the most important part of characterization is making your characters believable. This is not only to lend credibility to your story, but so that your readers can relate to your characters.

At the end of the session, one woman asked how you write aliens (implying intelligent aliens) because she had some in the book she was writing. The unanimous answer was "I don't". Or, if they were used, it was only to serve a plot purpose, not as full characters in their own rights. If one looks at aliens in literature, this is the general way they are dealt with (just think of that lovable Spock, who represents the pure logical, emotion-suppressed version of humanity).

So, why is this the case?

In brief, because, it most people seem to forget that aliens are, well, alien. In other words, it's not only their biology and culture that will be different, but their very thinking itself. So, first off, trying to imagine a completely alien thinking is incredibly difficult. Imagine different ideas of relationships, different thoughts of what may be important to life, different ideas of jobs or economy, or socio-political heirarchy. And all this with only humans as a sample set. Then, if you successfully manage, you have the challenge of conveying that to your reader, remembering that they've had much less time thinking about it then you have.

If you don't believe me on how hard it is, try it. I challenge you to create a truly alien alien. Once you do, have a close look. Are you sure your alien isn't just some caricature of humanity, some creature that highlights you most or least favourite human trait?

This is precisely why virtually all fictional aliens are intentional caricatures. Because, with a sample set of precisely ZERO aliens to use as examples, a caricature is the best fictional use of an alien.

But I'd still love to see your attempts, so feel free to drop them in the comments.

Insight and longevity.

Images from the Scrapbook

'Sup? Another rainy, dreary day in Isles

Music: You Should Be Dancing by the Bee Gees

 I've been on a bit of a political rampage lately, so I thought I'd get real now and calm things down a little.

I recently found myself looking through backup directories for some images, and found a number of ideas and partially finished drafts that I'll likely not go back to. So I thought I'd share a few here. In some cases I never finished them because of software upgrades. For example, when I went from Daz3D v2 to v3, there were problems reading the files. I've now discovered that the latest update of version 3 seems to have fixed that, so perhaps I will go back to a few (so I won't show those here).

Slow Burn - EHRydberg

 Slow Burn is a fairly early image I did combining models from Daz3D with landscaping and other models from Bryce. It was meant to have a book cover feel set around a story idea I'd had.

I've always liked the way the image turned out, but if I could find the original files, I'd like to remove the shadow under the big ship and possilby make a better divide between the people and ships so that it would more easily fit into a book cover format.

Tunnel - EHRydberg

Called 'Tunnel' for lack of a better title, this image was done by playing with primitives and texture/lighting in Bryce. The idea was a tunnel between times or dimensions, the close on being primitive, the distant more advanced. I developed this image further, but thanks for various moves and computer crashes, I can't find any of the other images.

Beach Memories - EHRydberg

Hellsing - EHRydberg

 Beach memories and Hellsing were both done primarily in Daz3D as simple model-centric images. Further postprocessing with Gimp made them what they are today.

With Beach Memories I've just played with the photo filter, which adds the specific border and a sepia colour filter to give it that aged-photo look.

Hellsing was a bit boring until I used the radial blur to give the appearance of action. I'm not entire I've used the optimal setting as looking at parts of the image almost give me a headache! Regardless, the blurred version is far more dramatic than the original.

The oval lighting was most easily achieved in Daz3d using a spotlight, although I suppose a similar affect could be achieved with a mask in Gimp.

Mutant Spider Woman - EHRydberg

 Mutant Spider Woman. The title kind of says it all. This creation was made around an idea for part of my Gateway story series where one colony of human have landed on a particularly mutagenic planet and changed into spider-like people over several hundred years. There's more to it than that, by why spoil the story for you?

The Daz3D image was created using several Victoria models overlapped and then turning off visualization of all but their legs. I'm quite happy at how the model turned out, but I haven't had call to use it in any further images as of yet. Although now that I've dug it out again, maybe I'll play some more.

Spygirl - EHRydberg

 Spygirl is another portrait experiment made a rendered entirely in Daz3D. My main interest was in seeing if I could get some dramatic light and shadow. I used a single spotlight and played with the positioning until there was just a bit of back lighting and it worked fairly well. If I was to do this again, I would probably use multiple spotlights with some set not to cast shadow, just to get more control over the model's front.

Underwater Search - EHRydberg

This was early attempt at an underwater scene in Bryce. I'm quite happy at how the light and colour turned out, although I didn't develop the image any further.

The water effect can essentially be achieved in multiple ways with Bryce. The easiest and cheapes on the renderer is just putting  a coloured plane in front of the camera. The other is to use a water-textured volume. I think in this experiment I actually did the latter, which is a very demanding render. I haven't played too much more with water scenes, as my main interests lay elsewhere at the moment, but I still think to return to it again sometime as water pieces do have an attractive, eerie quality to them.

Insight and longevity