Writing the Alien

Writing The Alien: (A RavenCon 2022 Panel)

In April of 2022, I finally made it to what had originally been on my schedule as Ravencon 2020.

While some panels are good because of what they say, some are great because of the inspiration they give you. This? This was a great panel.

The description for the titular panel was as follows:

The challenge of writing an intelligence unlike our own lies at the heart of much of our best science fiction. How does an author tackle this difficult task?

The panelists were, Grey Rinehart (who moderated) and Pamela K. Kinney.

6 Things To Think About When Writing ‘The Alien’ While most tv aliens seem to have also originated from apes, consider other options. How do they orient? In both space and time There is an aboriginal tribe that navigates by compass direction — INSTEAD of saying ‘right’ and ‘left’ Another aboriginal tribe that navigates by orientation to the nearest river Do they describe time as moving forward? Or up? Or something else Remember that their goals and obstacles will be different Think about which of their senses is strongest and lead their descriptions from that point AIs communicate much faster Do you want your humans to lose some of their humanity as they come to understand the alien? Vice versa? Or neither. Things That Don’t Always Work Complex communication by pheromones is hard to believe, while scent can enrich one’s information, it’s a poor primary source Stories where aliens make up new words everytime they speak — and not just new in the context of the story Story Recommendations Dragon’s Egg and Flight of the Dragonfly by Robert L Foreward (who was also a physicist) Barsk by Lawrence M.