{"id":8410,"date":"2019-04-09T18:02:37","date_gmt":"2019-04-09T22:02:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.monsffa.ca\/?page_id=8410"},"modified":"2024-05-06T16:50:14","modified_gmt":"2024-05-06T20:50:14","slug":"dannys-alien-creations","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.monsffa.ca\/?page_id=8410","title":{"rendered":"Danny’s Alien Creations"},"content":{"rendered":"

In high school, I created aliens.<\/h3>\n

When I was in high school, I read James White, and Janet Kagan, and Wayne Douglas Barlowe. I read Larry Niven and Stanley Weinbaum. I read Hal Clement. But I also read Stephen J. Gould.<\/p>\n

I learned about the concept of the Bauplan \u2013 the primitive concept of the \u2018body plan\u2019 that early taxonomists used in their attempts to classify phyla, and the more modern versions used today. The tetrapod Bauplan that we all adhere to \u2013 four limbs, a head, a torso… eyes… a spine… a brain… \u2013 and the others. Arthropods. Molluscs. Annelids. Organisms that were radially symmetrical instead of bilaterally.<\/p>\n

I learned about the Cambrian Explosion, and about the Ediacaran fossils that antedate it. Baupl\u00e4ne that were nothing like what now exists.<\/p>\n

I learned about the role of historical contingency. \u201cSurvival of the fittest\u201d isn\u2019t as straightforward as you might think: circumstances change, and what was suitable one day may be wholly unsuitable the next. There\u2019s no set goal to evolution, no specific target.
\nAnd I looked at the aliens in the books I was reading. And I wondered, how alien were they really.<\/p>\n

I decided to try creating intelligent aliens based not on what I needed for a story, but on an alien Bauplan. A body that would be like nothing we knew.<\/p>\n

I remember sitting in history class (well, I only remember doing these in one particular classroom, and it\u2019s where I took history class, but these weren\u2019t all on one occasion, so they probably occurred elsewhere too) and sketching so many different false starts.<\/p>\n

There was the spiderweb creature. It had entire spideroids as its appendages: one at each of four corners. The mind would be in the fibres of the web, and… no. Too fragile, and too biologically implausible. How would this even have evolved? Complex appendages, sure, but they\u2019d need to be on a complex organism.<\/p>\n

There was the enormous rectangular-prism monolith creature. It \"\"<\/a>had a slime-secreting gastropod foot the size of a hundred-year-old tree stump, and tentacles with serrated maws like alligator clips… and I remember that there was an eye. And gill slits on its top facet. And it would have a silicaceous carapace \u2013 perhaps it could alter the carapace\u2019s optical properties at will so that it could make itself have a mirror finish, and thereby sneak into a herd of prey? But… ultimately, it seemed boring. It wasn\u2019t an alien, it was a monster.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>There were the black-and-white rounded patio tables that ran around on five legs and talked via radio pulses. So their language would be very high-pitched, shrill. Rapid-fire modulated bleeping, like a fax machine, or \u2013 although I devised these before I ever heard modem noises \u2013 a modem. The \u201cWIIINIIIP\u201d, they\u2019d call themselves. Or \u201cWEENEEP\u201d. In all-caps. Their planet wouldn\u2019t have much atmosphere. They would generate laser pulses from their legs, and shoot prey with them, and then use a feeding leg to suck up the liquefied remains. They wouldn\u2019t see like we would, but they\u2019d absorb light via the black on the table-disc part. They\u2019d have five sexes… or maybe they\u2019d just need five to reproduce? Anyway, they\u2019d hold their mating legs together, and their mating feet would all fuse together and fall off, and that tiny little thing, the central lump, the fusion disc, would form a new baby. And then… what? What else could I do with these creatures? What kind of a society could they build? They had no appendages for holding tools \u2013 at most, they could push things around. And when I thought about their planet, it seemed empty. They didn\u2019t feel as if they could be real. They were a concept, not a creation.<\/p>\n

I honestly don\u2019t recall what order I made these in. But eventually, I decided to be methodical. What were the organs a creature would need? Or rather, what functions did I want these organs to fulfill?<\/p>\n

It needed to be able to perceive its environment. It needed some way to see. But not necessarily eyes, not the way we understand them. As long as there was something photosensitive.<\/p>\n

It needed to be able to take in food. A mouth.<\/p>\n

It needed to be able to move around. It needed to be able to breathe. It needed to be able to reproduce.<\/p>\n

And it needed to be able to manipulate its environment.<\/p>\n

Eventually, I drew it. The first version was more cylindrical, but I \"\"<\/a>sketched it again and again as the weeks went by, and the top broadened until it looked more like an inverted isosceles triangle \u2013 I remember, some months later, being surprised by how un-triangular the first version was.<\/p>\n

It had a giant head \u2013 it was a giant head, almost. There was a giant mouth, with lots and lots of serrated teeth… and it didn\u2019t have a jaw. Or… well, not a temporomandibular joint. Its jaw was not separate, its jaw was fused. I don\u2019t know that the vocabulary exists to describe this properly. Basically, its mouth was always open to a fixed width and length.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

There was one thick central leg, with a rounded elephantlike foot. It would hop \u2013 or, more precisely, it would move in a combination of hopping and knuckle walking. Sort of as if it was on crutches. And knuckle walking implies hands. Big hands. Giant hands. Two of them. With claws. The adults don\u2019t have opposable thumbs, but the fingers are more curved towards each other than on human hands. And they were webbed.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/a><\/td>\n\"\"<\/a><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

And a tongue. And breathing slits. And four rounded nails on the foot \u2013 which was, as I said earlier, elephantlike. Four fingers on the hands, four toes on the foot.<\/p>\n

And, above the arms, protruding from the headbody: Wings.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Well, not wings, not precisely. They\u2019re big, and they\u2019re flappy, but they\u2019re not for flying. At best they\u2019re for gliding. If they jump off a cliff, they can steer their descent. If your definition of \u201cpatagium\u201d is broad enough to include a flap that\u2019s not stretched between anything, then it\u2019s a patagium. And they can fold it across themselves to keep warm, or to serve as eyelid-equivalents when they sleep.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

They\u2019re called \u2013 they call themselves \u2013 K\u2019Sin\u2019T\u2019Xiks. (Yes, there\u2019s a difference between the \u2018x\u2019 sound and the \u2018ks\u2019 sound.) And they call their world G\u2019Jin\u2019D\u2019Stek.<\/p>\n

One detail I\u2019m pleased with is that often, writers will say that an alien species has a language that we can\u2019t pronounce properly \u2013 their vocal apparatus is more complex than ours and therefore they have more phonemes than we do, which are typically represented by non-letter characters. The K\u2019Sin\u2019T\u2019Xiks are the inverse of that: their vocal apparatus \u2013 and thus their phoneme range \u2013 is more limited than ours. To speak like a K\u2019Sin\u2019T\u2019Xiks, open your mouth until you\u2019re in the right position to vocalize the sound \u201cih\u201d. Then open it a little more until you\u2019re almost in the right position to vocalize the sound \u201ceh\u201d; if you can actually vocalize the sound \u201ceh\u201d, you\u2019ve gone too far. Then tense your jaw and don\u2019t move it.<\/p>\n

Their language doesn\u2019t have a name. They\u2019ve never needed to name it, because they\u2019ve never encountered a second language. This isn\u2019t because everyone on the planet speaks the same language… it\u2019s because most of them don\u2019t speak language at all<\/p>\n

The K\u2019Sin\u2019T\u2019Xiks are in their equivalent of the Neolithic era (and I\u2019ll admit that this is in part because I can\u2019t extrapolate an entirely alien technology tree). They\u2019re an apex predator, and a pretty successful one. Very adaptable, very prone to explore new territories when, for instance, glaciation makes land bridges, so they\u2019ve spread across most of the planet. But there\u2019s a hitch.<\/p>\n

They\u2019re an oviparous species… but they\u2019re not nest-tenders. The happy couple gaze into each other\u2019s vision patches, lean their heads against each other, clasp each other\u2019s enormous hands… and in that act of handclasping, the eggs are fertilized. Both the eggs, because they\u2019re hermaphrodites who fertilize each other. They bury their eggs in a safe spot, and wander off.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I once read a story in which, in the background, anthropologists from different species are arguing about what had to be the First Inventions, the ones without which civilization could not have begun. And the anthropologist from an aquatic species scoffs at the notion that it\u2019s fire, and argues that the first invention had to be ropes and nets, because how else could you keep things from floating away.<\/p>\n

In the K\u2019Sin\u2019T\u2019Xiks, the invention which allowed the onset of civilization was not fire. It was not the stone ax. It was not agriculture or domestication. It was child-rearing.<\/p>\n

Without the instinct to raise your offspring and teach them to survive, each generation has to learn everything for itself. It\u2019s been barely a thousand years since the onset of the hatchling-raiser caste. And raisers are still quite rare. There\u2019s maybe four million K\u2019Sin\u2019T\u2019Xiks on the planet…. of which maybe a few tens of thousands are part of the proto-civilization. The others are… the word \u201csavages\u201d has a lot of negative connotations. Let\u2019s say \u201cferal\u201d.<\/p>\n

I mentioned earlier that the adults don\u2019t have opposable thumbs. The hatchlings do. As they age, the thumbs become less opposable, and fine manipulation becomes more difficult. This is another advantage to digging up someone else\u2019s eggs and bringing them back to civilization to hatch and be taught: you need the children to do the detail work. They haven\u2019t yet figured out the connection between malnutrition and delayed puberty, but they\u2019ve noted that when times are bad, the children keep their thumbs longer, and are able to learn more skills and do more things.<\/p>\n

They\u2019ve recently developed the basics of agriculture. They\u2019re mostly obligate carnivores (what else could you expect with teeth like that?), but once you have agriculture, ranching becomes easier: the prey animals (mostly trundlers) are less likely to try to escape if you supply them with food. Plus there are the occasional medicinal \"\"<\/a>herbs, and flavorsome spices. Note that ranching is a derivative of child-rearing: what if you find trundler hatchlings and, rather than eating them or ignoring them, you stampede them into an enclosure? And then you give them big piles of leaves and fruit to eat, and they stop trying to escape. And they become adults, and eventually they lay their own eggs in the enclosure! And then you kill and eat the adults, and start over \u2013 and this time, you don\u2019t even have to find hatchlings to stampede into the enclosure. It helps that you don\u2019t need to eat every day.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

They\u2019re gradually expanding their territory. Digging up the eggs buried by ferals, and bringing them in to civilization to hatch and raise and make into people. An important part of their culture, one which the raisers inculcate into the children as early as possible, is that you only mate in the approved mating grounds. Laying your eggs outside the approved mating grounds is bad, because of the possibility that the egg-fetchers won\u2019t be able to find them. If they hatch in the wild, then they could become feral.<\/p>\n

Raisers are rare because the children can\u2019t just be taught to be raisers. They need a genetic propensity for those behaviors. The gene in question is present among the worldwide feral populations too, albeit at an even lower prevalence. Child-rearing could be re-invented elsewhere. A second civilization could be born on this planet. It just hasn\u2019t, that\u2019s all. Not yet \u2013 and, depending on how fast and how far the first one spreads \u2013 maybe not ever. And outside the context of child-rearing having been invented, that propensity is useless, like how dyslexia is survival-neutral outside the context of writing having been invented.<\/p>\n

Very slowly, the raiser trait is spreading through the population. Raisers don\u2019t favor their own eggs over those of the rest of the community \u2013 they don\u2019t even keep track of who laid which egg, except insofar as whether it was laid by someone within the community, or just a feral \u2013 but communities with more raisers are more prosperous.<\/p>\n

They\u2019ve recently invented music \u2013 well, singing. A few of them have started independently working out the rudiments of figurative art; the raisers aren\u2019t sure yet whether it\u2019s useful. They have the basics of arithmetic \u2013 tally marks. They\u2019re learning to redirect streams and make ponds. Some of the children can shape clay. I honestly don\u2019t know if they\u2019ve figured out how to make fire. They bury their dead.<\/p>\n

They have no idea that they have a fossil record, or what that means. They\u2019ve seen meteors, of course \u2013 what Neolithic population wouldn\u2019t? \u2013 but they don\u2019t know what they are, or what the connection is to the Nr\u2019Tatek impact crater that shaped their evolutionary history. They don\u2019t even know that Nr\u2019Tatek is an impact crater. It\u2019s just a place.<\/p>\n

They have a creation myth. It tells of how, at the beginning of the world, First Parent K\u2019San\u2019J\u2019Cha fertilized its own eggs and laid them in the sky. After the first people hatched, the fragments of the eggshells became the stars.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Writing is a long way off in their future, but they\u2019ve got an oral tradition. They tell each other stories.<\/p>\n

And at night, they dream.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In high school, I created aliens. When I was in high school, I read James White, and Janet Kagan, and Wayne Douglas Barlowe. I read Larry Niven and Stanley Weinbaum. I read Hal Clement. But I also read Stephen J. Gould. I learned about the concept of the Bauplan \u2013 the primitive concept of the … Continue reading Danny’s Alien Creations<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":645,"featured_media":0,"parent":1851,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-8410","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.monsffa.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/8410","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.monsffa.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.monsffa.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.monsffa.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/645"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.monsffa.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8410"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.monsffa.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/8410\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31140,"href":"https:\/\/www.monsffa.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/8410\/revisions\/31140"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.monsffa.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1851"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.monsffa.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8410"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}