Hatrack River Writers Workshop: The alien mind

This is topic The alien mind in forum Open Discussions About Writing at Hatrack River Writers Workshop.

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Posted by nellievrolyk (Member # 1616) on :

How do you go about getting into the minds of the alien characters you create?

I only have one alien character in the story I'm working on and I find it very difficult to get into the kind of mindset that will make this character believable as an alien and also as an android. I have this tendency to think like a human unfortunately when it comes to story requirements.

Posted by Balthasar (Member # 5399) on :

Here's Ben Bova's advise:

quote:
In science fiction, the character need not be a human being. Science fiction stories have been written in which the protagonist is a robot, an alien from another world, a supernatural being, an animal or even a plant. But in each case, the story was successful only if the protagonist -- no matter what he/she/it looked like or was made of -- behaved like a human being.
[...]. If a reader starts a story about a machine or a tree or a pintail duck, and the protagonist has no human traits at all -- it simply grinds its gears or sways in the wind or lays eggs -- the reader will quickly put the story down and turn to something else. But give the protagonist a human problem, such as survival, and let it struggle to solve the problem, and the reader will be able to enjoy the story
From: The Craft of Writing Science Fiction that Sells (Cincinnati, 1981), p. 12.

Good luck!

[This message has been edited by Balthasar (edited April 18, 2003).]

Posted by Chronicles_of_Empire (Member # 1431) on :

There's nothing wrong with thinking like a human - so long as you put it into some sort of cultural context.

If you look at our species you'll find a lot of ways of thinking are very much integral with the cultural paradigms that surround it.

For example, although a native Chinese and a native English may look at the same objects and concepts, they can often think of them in different ways.

Something I noted along those lines the other day was an article that referred to how in the English language time is seen as in terms of "forwards" or backwards" - whereas in China apparently the traditional Taoist viewpoint sees time as moving in terms of "up" and "down" instead.

(though perhaps Survivor could correct me on this issue- I'm trying to be illustrative with something I'm not properly conversant in).

Posted by nellievrolyk (Member # 1616) on :

Thanks Balthasar, Chronicles :-)

I was concerned that my alien android was behaving too human to make him believable. But it seems that might be a desirable thing for it makes him more sympathetic to the reader.

Now all I have to do is come up with something just slightly skewed from our human ways of thinking to bring out the alien. So that my protagonist, who tends to think of him as human, will see him for what he is. The miserable thing is: my mind goes blank on this.

Posted by Survivor (Member # 213) on :

I can't speak for traditional Taoism, but I'll speak to some issues of the classical Chinese mindset.

English (and western philosophy generally) is full of dualisms, opposites or diametrically tensile concepts...like "forwards" or backwards". If you want to talk about something that relates or modifies that dicotomy, usually you chose a recognizably orthagonal concept...like "up", "down" or "left", "right" (moving up is at ninety degrees to forwards, moving up doesn't imply movement forwards or backwards or left/right). We can extend that by talking about color, temperature, size, etc.

Chinese organization tends to be a bit...different. For instance, take yin and yang. Yin incoperates female, wet, dark, cold, Earthy, and so on and so forth. Yang tends to be thought of as just the opposite (to a westerner) but it is really the set of male, dry (air), light and heat (from a flame), Wind, clouds and a bunch of other associations independent of the fact that different (rather than opposite) concepts are embodied by yin.

Or take the classical Chinese allusions, the set of things that will go into a stew and make it taste good. All the elements of the set are interrelated, nothing is good in a stew by itself, it is only part of the set because of the other members of the set, and if the set had some other members, then that would change all the relationships, but the set would still be "things that are good in a stew", even though changing a few members of the set would have forced the entire membership of the set to change, it is still the aforementioned set

Is anyone getting this? The whole "things that taste good in a stew" concept is actually more important to classical Chinese thought (it is sometimes referred to as "harmony") than is the Yin/Yang (now why don't we have a smilely for that?) thing...and westerners tend to misunderstand the Yin/Yang thing because they want to make it a duality (I hate to say this, but Jordon does an okay interpretation of the underlying mechanics of the idea in his Saidin/Saidair bit) when it really isn't...it is more an expression of harmony at the simplest level...harmonic oscillation.