Designing Intelligent Aliens

TravelHat

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Does anyone know of any good resources for designing intelligent aliens? It could be a book, webpage or even another thread in Absolute Write (although I couldn't find one using search).

I am looking for something which might include the science behind "alien design", cultural ideas, and anything else to help flesh out a alien species.

Thanks
Michael
 

badducky

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The only science behind alien design I know of is the science of studying earthly non-human intelligences, like corvids, octopi, or dolphins.

Bees and ants, too.
 

deafblindmute

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Make intelligent fungus people.

....why? I dunno.

Point is, when I think of any alien design, I take something that may not seem that extraordinary, and branch off a whole design based on some element or gimmick. And just sorta...go from there. Or I look at HR Geiger images.
 

SillyLittleTwit

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[Nitpick]Octopuses or octopodes. Octopus comes from Greek, not Latin.[/Nitpick]

To answer the initial question, I can really only point to a fictional example, the Amnion in Stephen Donaldson's Gap series. A successful example of a completely alien psychology.
 

TravelHat

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Thanks all

I have been trying to design a scientifically plausible, advanced alien species which are methane based, and thrive on very cold planets (e.g. -300F)
 

Simpson17866

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My favorite specific example of alien psychology comes from Peter Watt's first contact novel Blindsight available for free on his website. The story is good and the copious amounts of exposition never feel slow (the characters' stated motivation is to learn about the aliens, so every "infodump" is less an interruption from the plot and more of a development in the plot itself), and for those readers who love hard SciFi exposition for it's own sake, the Notes and Acknowledgements at the end is as hilarious is the story itself. If you're the kind of reader who enjoys that, I would recommend reading it first. I did. Actually, a lot of it was beyond my level, but I skimmed the whole thing. The same man also wrote a John Carpenter fanfiction The Things that does a fantastic job of showing just how wrong we look to the alien, and these two stories were the main inspiration that got me thinking about non-human psychology in my own SciFi/Fantasy.

Although the main method that I use comes from a TVTropes article So You Want To: Design An Alien Mind and a Giant In The Playground post that references the same article: Rearranging Maslow's Hierarchy. Humans care about Physiological Needs first out of five, then Security Needs second out of five, then Relationship Needs third out of five... but maybe another species needs Relationships first and Physiological Needs last. We wouldn't understand why that species doesn't fear death and give it their all to live longer, but they wouldn't understand why we do care about making ourselves miserable delaying the inevitable instead of making the best of the time we have.

This clearly isn't a common method – I found the TVTropes article years ago, have been looking for "rearrange Maslow's Hierarchy science fiction" ever sinve to see if other people do it, and to this day, the GiantITP post is the only one I've found besides my own postings – but it's a method that I've had great success with.
 

TravelHat

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My favorite specific example of alien psychology comes from Peter Watt's first contact novel Blindsight available for free on his website. The story is good and the copious amounts of exposition never feel slow (the characters' stated motivation is to learn about the aliens, so every "infodump" is less an interruption from the plot and more of a development in the plot itself), and for those readers who love hard SciFi exposition for it's own sake, the Notes and Acknowledgements at the end is as hilarious is the story itself. If you're the kind of reader who enjoys that, I would recommend reading it first. I did. Actually, a lot of it was beyond my level, but I skimmed the whole thing. The same man also wrote a John Carpenter fanfiction The Things that does a fantastic job of showing just how wrong we look to the alien, and these two stories were the main inspiration that got me thinking about non-human psychology in my own SciFi/Fantasy.

Although the main method that I use comes from a TVTropes article So You Want To: Design An Alien Mind and a Giant In The Playground post that references the same article: Rearranging Maslow's Hierarchy. Humans care about Physiological Needs first out of five, then Security Needs second out of five, then Relationship Needs third out of five... but maybe another species needs Relationships first and Physiological Needs last. We wouldn't understand why that species doesn't fear death and give it their all to live longer, but they wouldn't understand why we do care about making ourselves miserable delaying the inevitable instead of making the best of the time we have.

This clearly isn't a common method – I found the TVTropes article years ago, have been looking for "rearrange Maslow's Hierarchy science fiction" ever sinve to see if other people do it, and to this day, the GiantITP post is the only one I've found besides my own postings – but it's a method that I've had great success with.

Thanks, I will take a look