I'm trying to come up with aliens for a space fantasy story, but all I really know is that I need some aliens for plot reasons. Any tips on where to start?
Addition to my previous question about creating aliens: how do I make them feel like more than random additions to the story’s population (I need aliens in general for a Reason, but haven’t figured out more than that)? Any thoughts on integrating them thematically, etc?
There could be two tacts you’re asking about here, and I’m not sure which you’re hoping for, so I’ll touch on both.
What plot purpose do they serve? It’s not the best way to grow cultures, but you can start by thinking about what things you were intending to have them do and then grow backwards from there. Let’s take an example: You need them to interfere with the travel of the characters.
What kind of people would want to interfere with travel? Is the travel through their area? If so, then these may be a territorial species that takes affront easily at perceived slights such as others assuming they can pass through their territory without asking first. Okay, so they’re easily offended and willing to fight for what they believe they have a right to, and they’re quick to anger. Perhaps that can translate to quick to act as well, that they’re fast buggers. What would make them fast? Is it a physiological something or a technological piece? Is it their ships that make them quick or is it that they have spider legs that carry them across a room in a swift scuttle of movement?
You see where I’m going? You can kind of start to make inferences and leaps based off the trails you start forming in who these people are that can take you into what they might look like physically and how they might act when face to face with your characters.
Appearance is sometimes tied up with culture, but it’s much harder to reverse-engineer this detail in the way that you can kind of reverse-engineer the broad strokes of culture and a peoples’ ideals, so unless you have a really clear idea already of how their culture would impact their appearance, I suggest you mostly just start throwing words at the page and seeing how you can make them look interesting. This is a project in character design in an artistic sense more than the anthropological or writing sense, so sit down and think about what would look cool. What kinds of creatures have you always wanted to write with but never had a good excuse? Do you want them to be animal-based or more humanoid? Or do you want to try something with an entirely different physiology? Start throwing adjectives at the page and see which ones sound interesting together. Purple, spines, bug-like arms, stripes, made of living stone, carries children to term in a clear sack from their back, small eyes, no eyes, thick curly hair–not all of them will work, and not all of them will work together, but you can mix and match details until you’re able to start seeing an image in your mind of some kind of creature. Try writing a stripped down description–not in a scene, just a description–and see if the image it brings to mind is something you want to explore. If not, try again. Go out and look for artist’s renditions and concept art and take cues from them–not direct draws, but inspiration with tweaks. You can choose to develop a culture out of that if you want to, or you can simply drop them into your plot events.
Finally, perhaps the easiest way to start forming these is to start with a base of an archetypal race. It’s not great, and you definitely don’t want to leave them as strictly the archetype, but it can give you a foundation to work off of initially that you can grow out further into something more based in being people and less in ideas of tradition and ideals. So you might have the isolationists, the trade aficionados, the warriors ready to fight anybody, those guided by their religious prophecies, those who welcome anyone and help as much as they can, those who make their livings servicing ships that wander into their space (space mechanics, if you will), those who aren’t trusted by anybody because you always seem to come away without your purse, those who have some cause they stand behind, and a thousand other possibilities. Then once you have kind of their core, you can start growing out their motives and how they live so that you can start to understand how they might interact with your characters and whether they’d serve the plot point you need them to.
To integrate them a bit more than simply those plot points, try to weave in references to them or even appearances earlier in the stories and see if you can work them into later scenes as well. The more you can blend them into the rest of the story and weave the tapestry of the world to include them, the more they’ll feel natural. Seeing one of their ships at space dock or hearing a news report of a rebellion going on on their home world, even mentioning that they used to be a part of a ship’s crew before they decided to go home for a vacation and never came back will help. Foods that might have come from their world are a great way to start introducing things about their culture, references like, “You sound like a [whatever],” will help make it seem like these aren’t just out of the blue but species that others have heard of, that exist as part of the universe of the story.
I hope that’s helped a little bit. It can be pretty daunting, but it works just the same as worldbuilding when you’re working with a ground-based world, just with more diverse physiology. Let your imagination run wild. You can refine later. Good luck! -Pear
