Thus I feel forced to write in 1st person, but even with that, references to the other aliens will still have to be in third, and they are all multi-sexed.

Any suggestions on how to handle this situation?

--One idea I thought of, but I'm not sure I like, was of referring to the aliens all as male until mating time, then when they become pregnant refer to all of them as female. That would still be a bit jarring I think and will sound homosexual when I describe the MC's attraction to another alien, which isn't what I am going for, and isn't actually the way it works, so I wonder if there would be some believability issues there.

Help!

Are there any human characters you can use for reference? Probably not or you would have solved it the easy way. I'd say, since it's an alien, pick a term in the alien tongue and waste some of your Exposition dollars trying to establish what it means, then roll with it.

Or go with it, which is gender-neutral, but at least a word we know.

OR try to avoid using pronouns.

She-it doesn't work, for obvious reasons.

Rather than work in first person, I would generate a word.

English has a lot of words, but it sometimes lacks proper flexibility. We create words when we have need for them, and until people started wondering about sentient beings without the genders we cling to, there was no need for a pronoun to describe them. "It" was our catch-all.

I warn strongly against making up a word for this. I think it has a lot of potential to confuse people. If I started seeing "thon" everywhere a pronoun should be I would eventually get it, but I'd be reading your first couple of paragraphs half a dozen times and hsaking my head in confusion...I doubt an editor will do that.

You *can* just go with it. It really is a catch-all. My biggest problem was that I kept randomly reverting to "he" from time to time. (Interesting study in psychology, actually, because the character I was calling "it" was more feminine than masculine.)

Anyway, there is another option to go along with your first person account. The alien wrote the account, but who translated it into English? The choice of pronouns would have been made by that person. Now, I'm just throwing this out there, but maybe you can have an author's (translators?) note or a prologue or something like that at the head of the story with a blurb from the translator. At that point, you can make up any word you want. Alternately, you can have the translator claim to be using "him" in a gender neutral sense. (I wouldn't recommend this because the readers will not think of it neutrally.)

quote:

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That would still be a bit jarring I think and will sound homosexual when I describe the MC's attraction to another alien, which isn't what I am going for, and isn't actually the way it works,

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Could you expand on this a bit? Are they attracted to opposite gender aspect in each other, or does gender have nothing to do with the attraction?

http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=hermaphrodite
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=androgyne
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=gynandromorph

Perhaps: andro, herm, herma, gygan (might not work because of Star Trek: TNG sound-alike).

I also like the prologue idea. Worked for Tolkien to introduce Hobbits. If the aliens aren't introduced until later in the story, perhaps an expository chapter would work.

In fact, I have a similar situation in my novel (see thread on alien languages) where the alien in question is asexual and reproduced by what is essentially fusion. I'm tap-dancing around the issue in the first draft, but I'm probably going to invent an alien word that represents any individual--something like: The gazork came into the room. Translation: The individual from my species came into the room.

Might work for you also. (Gazork is the first thing that popped into my head.)

[This message has again been edited by Spaceman (edited June 10, 2005).]

In other words, "he" is used to refer generally to one unspecified person when one of those unspecified things is gender.

This is subtly different from the case where we have a specified person (or alien), and know its gender, but it has both genders. There is no case for handling this in the English language. Some might argue for using "he" based on the same rule you cited, but I argue that they are wrong. You start calling an alien "he" and human readers will consider it male, even though this is not true.

Your prologue could also be an entry from, say, an exploratory colonization ship that ultimately finds the planet unsuitable, but does refer to the creatures, pointing out their hermaphroditic nature and assigning a gender-neutral pronoun for convenience sake. Or, alternatively, you could just say "The alien", or use the name of the alien's species instead of he or she. Of course then you still have to deal with himself/herself issues. Itself might work, though.

Think about this for a moment, seriously. Why would anything analogous to our ideas of romantic (rather than merely sexual) attraction ever develop in a race where all the members of the species were hermaphrodites?

Sure, you'd still want to seek out a mate with exceptional genetics, so sexual attraction would play a strong role. In fact, which partner was more attractive would tend to determine which acted as the "male" and which as the "female". The one doing the pursuing would probably be content to take the more burdensome parental role, the super-fit would probably get pregnant a little less often but would impregnate others much more frequently.

Eventually, with the rise of culture, contract law, and all that good stuff, you'd probably find legal arrangements where one individual who was not sexually attractive by the usual standards could nonetheless comphensate another for bearing one of "his" children (such persons would probably already be bearing their own children unless there were some reason it was impractical). But that wouldn't be part of their evolutionary heritage, would it? There wouldn't be any reason it would have to be an exclusive relationship or anything like that.

And I can love men and women without being particularly sexually attracted to them. If I can do it, anyone can. Let me put a bit of a point on that point. I can love others without feeling any desire that their genetics should be shared with my own children. I don't know if humans generally are able to feel this way, certainly it isn't the sort of thing that you say to people to show affection ("I like you even though I want to make sure my children don't have your genetic defects" ). And honestly speaking, I'd marry and procreate with a woman who had "genetic defects" (yeah, even if she were blond ), if I felt like I wanted to spend my life with her and have her involved in raising my children. Because I don't live in a culture where you can separate love and procreation that easily.

But for a society of hermaphrodites...there would be no reason that love and procreation would be mixed in any way, because everyone can do it themselves. If you were in a cooperative "labor sharing" partnership with someone (and this partnership could include any number of individuals) and you found out about a super-fit who was willing to get you pregnant, it would be much more desirable for you to share that super-fit with your partner than to couple directly.

I mean, all this depends a bit on what you mean by "both male and female", the specifics of how the biological investment works out. But having what we would understand to be romantic attachments would be a serious error in plausibility.

Niven & Pournelle, in The Mote in God's Eye, used the appropriate pronoun for an alien based on where it was in its hermaphroditic cycle. Since theirs was much slower than that of your aliens', it wasn't confusing. Essentially they were almost all "she." If there had been sex scenes, I guess this would have taken care of the apparent homosexuality problem.

But, I have to report that using the s/he and 'hir' options also aren't working for me. I wanted to hurl the story across the room after a paragraph, and I'm the author so I know the reader will hate it as well.

I know that people are biased against first person, but in this story I really see no other feasible way to address the problem. I will use 'it' when referring to other aliens, but try to limit the usage as much as possible.

The biggest question you must answer is: how important is this alien gender issue to your plot? In The Left Hand of Darkness it was very important, so LeGuin worked hard at building the vocabulary and attitudes of her characters and narrator. But if it is just window dressing on your world, not central to plot, then you can be casual about it.

I ran into a similar problem with robots and computers as characters. When I call my robots and computers "it" I get lots of complaints from critiquers: they say the mechanical characters are stiff, boring, flat, underdeveloped, etc.

If I simply change "it" to "he" and "she" with no further description or character development, critiquers stop complaining.

Yoimeni a darikwyrm went to their fridge. Such an old fridge. How long had they had it they wondered?

It may mess with some people's heads though.

AstroStewart above said it is wrong to refer to someone of unknown gender this way, however their gender is not unknown in this case. Our language is setup for 2 genders, not three of four or more. What if there was a race that had a male, a female and a receiver sex into which an sperm and ovum were deposited by the respective male and female by means of some sort of penis/ovipositor ? There would be three clear sexes and you would have the same trouble as to how to refer to the receiver. In a language setup for two genders only, I think they (which is ambiguous) may be your best option.

I'm just saying, there is nothing wrong with the word "it" if you're talking about something that is an "it".

I think I have given up on using anything other than 'he.' I will simply describe 'him' getting pregnant at one point, and see how that goes over. Anyway, I need to stop talking about it and just do it.

The above sentence is a good example of why I cannot use 'it' to refer to the protagonist. 'It' is used in reference to far too many things for me to use it just in connection with one being.

[This message has been edited by autumnmuse (edited June 14, 2005).]