Xenofiction, at its core, exists as a challenge for the imagination. When it fails, as so often it does, it is by failing to imagine. Xenofiction’s ostenibly objective, simply put, is portraying a convincingly unhuman intelligence (henceforth, a ‘xeno’).
To the truly unimaginative, this is a chimerical objective. Intelligence, in the meaningful sense we will be using here, is unique to humans. Thus, it might uncharitably be likened to pursuing a square circle. But if you’re reading this, I assume you’ve the sense it’s closer to a black hole — something real, at the edge of possibility, but rigorously conjectured before ever found.
Noting the failures is easy — harder is diagnosis. First, we might productively note that unsuccessful xenofiction must, tautologically, be composed of two faults: the falsely familiar, which assumes to be similar what should be different; and the falsely alien, which assumes to be different what should be similar.
We’re quite familiar with the first type — it’s rubber forehead aliens, humans in animal costumes — but the second has no culturally cached criticism, no immediate distaste we’ve absorbed through osmosis. Indeed, we might even be impressed by it. But it’s the easiest way to try (actually try) writing xenofiction: to merely change and then deny similarity. That isn’t a skeleton, it’s a flesh-submerged bone-house. I’m slavinating my vodicules. What is ‘anger’? I do not comprehend this ‘sex’ you speak of. The falsely alien is using xeno-flavored jargon that only superficially differs from conventional description; the falsely alien is writing xenos mainly characterized by their failure to understand the conventional. In both cases the result is an alienness that feels affected and artificial.
(There’s some unclearness in this cursory description (after all, how different is alien jargon from slapping on a rubber forehead?), so to elaborate for a moment more, the falsely familiar is chiefly what happens when a writer doesn’t think. They don’t work out or present the implications of a character’s alienness, and they respond just as a human would. The falsely alien is the opposite: the writer is trying to make something alien, and the character is different from a human — but it’s an overcorrection, ignorant of convergent evolution and lacking justification. The alien is different for difference’s sake, and that alienness is not an implication of anything, but something bolted on or painted over. Importantly, these two problems are not exclusive: you can (and in poor examples of xenofiction do) find that a depiction falls prey to both ills in different places.)
Is there any escape from these two troubles, though? Is every xeno either a rubber forehead or a rabbit smeerp?
I hope not! And in this essay, I advance a model to create ones that aren’t.
How do you allow a xeno to be like humans without it being falsely familiar? How do you make them truly different, rather than falsely alien?
I’ve never found anyone giving a deep, systemic answer to these questions, so now I’m going to fix that.
I call my answer xenodeterminism. The core dogma is that a xeno is defined by three things and nothing else. A xeno senses to know the world; it values to judge the world; and it acts to change the world. When you’ve determined these three things, my theory holds you’ve exhausted what there is to say about your xeno, you can write them confident in their validity, and this reduction is the clearest way to think about them.
But first, one may ask: why bother writing a xeno?
There are three principal reasons.
One, speculative fiction has always indulged a tendency towards the novel and fantastical. Few of these stories exist, and that alone is reason to create them and explore their possibilities.
Two, some identify more with the alien than the human, for manifold reasons, and this becomes that exercise in representation, exulting in something far more exciting and pleasing than this body of an ape that learned to walk.
Three, we’re already writing nonhumans, even in the quotidian speculative works that still center on humans or quasi-humans. If we value realism, systemic worldbuilding, and faithfully examined cultures, then we need an answer to the challenge, just for practicality’s sake. Let’s build one.
But one last thing first. If a writing tutorial is like a recipe, then like any online recipes, it will include a digression for the author’s life story before getting on with it — but I think there’s some humor in how I came to be known in my circles as the xeno writer, the person people go to for advice. If nothing else, it’ll give you a sense for my credentials.
When I was a teen, I got into My Little Pony, which if you didn’t know, has a whole website dedicated to fanfiction of it, and at the time had a rich writing scene. These stories, like the source material, feature ponies, and often no humans at all — making the majority in some sense xenofiction, or xenofiction-adjacent at worst.
I never wrote (well, never published) MLP fanfic, but I read quite a lot of it. And when I finally did start (what would become) a large writing project, I went where my imagination lead. It lead me to Endless Stars, a story about dragons with a rich anatomical and expressive vocabulary, who signaled their emotions with the scent of the venom on their fangs. When I started hanging around writers, I got some credit for how distinctly not human my characters were, in a scene where few weren’t writing Worm-knockoff superhero serials. I enjoyed that distinction, to the point where, when I started outlining or drafting other stories, I went out of my way to not write humans. It let me brag about never writing humans.
You might wonder, with years of writing nonhumans under my belt if I’ve gotten good at it. Some think so! I’m less sure, myself — I suspect I fall prey to the falsely familiar often, even if no one’s complained of it.
But I don’t think that undermines this essay. Better to take advice from one who failed than one who never has; those who effortlessly succeed seldom know why.
This essay is a part of that striving — by articulating a theory of alien writing, I teach myself as well as others.
The Three Pillars
Senses
Senses precede thought. Before we had minds to understand or bodies to act, we were confused babies blinking and crying out at the new cacophony of color and noise.
I think the place to start when designing a species is to ask how it places itself in the world. How does it know what is? what is the world to it? Roaches live in a world of smell and touch where light is danger, while a mycelium lives in a world made only of water and nutrients. Would an elemental spirit see only that element — or would they perceive raw magic itself?
But most stories need not go to such extremes. Often, the classics – touch, sight, sound, smell — will do, perhaps augmented with a new type of sensitivity you might wish to explore.
(You may need no new sense at all, but I think any nonhuman will differ somewhere. It would be a bold move to crack open an essay that starts by decrying rubber foreheads if you intended to write something with strictly human senses. But I think even that doesn’t fully disqualify – I don’t believe that nothing that could wear our skin could be xeno. Even humans can be stranger than many aliens, let alone a speculative human in impossible worlds. But let this asterisk suffice; aliens have alien sense, and it’s a rule ideally broken after adherence grants appreciation.)
Even if it’s not the special new sense that makes the xeno unique, it’s worth interrogating every capability a xeno has, and deciding if it should be different and why. A cave-dweller needs eyes less than a savannah-stalker. (If there’s telepathy, are their ears as dull as a reptile’s?)
Sanderson’s Laws apply to more than magic. It’s worth probing the limitations of a sense in addition to its capabilities. Not just the basic stuff like ‘can’t see light outside of this range of wavelengths’ or even the weird stuff, like ‘cant detect the polarity of light’, though that’s great. I mean the fact that we can’t determine the wavelength of light, so we have three receptors of different sensitivity ranges and compare their responses to deduce the wavelength — it means that pure wavelengths and combinations of wavelengths become the same type of thing. That’s interesting! And immediately makes me think of ways to tinker with it – three receptors grant a three dimensional colorspace, suggesting that four receptors imply four axes. Imagine a xeno with a color sphere instead of a color wheel.
Or apply it to a different domain. Bandpass sound filters exist, and so we can imagine creatures that hear like we see, only able to detect volume in a few crude bands. (Perhaps this is good enough; the footsteps of predators are low-sound, the calls of mates are high-sounds). Sound propagates differently than light, leading me to think this organ couldn’t distinguish sources or harmonic content. All sound, whether song, voice or noice, is one color that shifts higher or lower (or both, into the magenta-like chord-qualia).
There are a lot of interesting possibilities in the space of senses, and I couldn’t hope to even map them, let alone explore them. They need not be this abstruse, even — the fact that a creature needs to blink its eyes or doesn’t is a characterizing detail of the sense. All of this falls out of thinking systemically about a sense, so I think it’s better to move on to what exactly you’re looking for when you do that thinking. Why care about senses?
Senses proceed thought, but I’ll go further and say that senses prefigure thought.
To see how, look back at that last sentence. ‘Proceed’ is a spatial relation (to go in front of), and here it’s a metaphor; these abstractions do not exist in a space to relate thusly.
And it continues. ‘To see’ is a visual metaphor, as is ‘look’. Try and read anything less formal than an academic paper, and test how far (‘far’) you can get without running into (‘running into’) this sort of device.
It’s not quite as glaringly omnipresent as I make it seem; I did rewrite this section once to add on (‘add on’) a few clearer (‘clearer’) hits. But everywhere where the underlying (‘underlying’) metaphor seems absent, it can be exhumed with brief research into (‘into’) its etymology. Conventional language is a graveyard of a dead metaphors.
Every abstraction and concept a xeno might have will be formed by reference to perceptual primitives. This is important, because fish easily forget water. It is natural to say things are clear, enlightening, or to reference differing perspectives and focuses — but a blind xeno would never frame things that way, and even a marginally inhuman mind (say, a batperson with functional eyes that nonetheless take a backseat to echolocation) would sooner ground their concepts in a more developed sense. The dragons of Endless Stars have tongues and vomeronasal organs as sensitive as the most distinguished snakes, and consequently litter their speech with olfactory metaphors.
This is no new insight, and is an old problem in fantasy. How can anyone in a secondary world be sadistic, if Marquis de Sade never existed? More blatantly, a careless ‘jeez!’ or ‘christ!’ takes any reader out of a fantasy.
This is a cursed problem; you want something unconnected to our world and language, yet written in our language. I don’t think there’s any simple answer. Ultimately, it’s the problem of immersive writing at all. Ultimately, it comes down to your own skill and judgments.
It’s enough to simply invoke the feeling of a different conceptual framework; every beginner artist learns that drawing every brick often yields an uglier wall than giving a few indications of texture here and there. A few flourishes do most of the work. Every detail added diminishes the returns of the next.
Thus, once you have outlined a xeno’s senses, invent some general idioms informed by that perception, and sprinkle them about. Avoid inappropriate references (a naked mole rat will never ‘see the solution’), but don’t overestimate the importance of them. Readers see what you include, and rarely notice what you leave out (well, sometimes they miss even what you include, but—). If you fastidiously excise any use of a word ever etymologically connected to light or sight, I think no one will notice, unless the circumlocution becomes too tortured to miss — certainly few will appreciate the work.
A tendency I have noticed in my own writing is what I’ve called the ‘search/replace school of xenofic writing’. Instead of ‘she saw the solution’, it goes, simply say ‘she smelled the solution’, and you are thinking like a xeno writer. While the laziness of offends the critic in me, I cannot deny the effectiveness. It works, in my experience, and readers will compliment you for it.
Obversely, the axiom writers are taught to live by is ‘show, don’t tell’. If the tell-y statement “she was excited” is bad because ‘excited’ is just a symbol for the emotion you really want to portray, then the show-ier ‘her pulse raced’ is scarcely better. It has a tactile quality, but ultimately it’s the writer showing the symbolic flashcard ‘racing pulse’, and the reader correctly generating the right answer “she’s excited”. When adding a layer of indirection, that indirection should mean something, add interpretations or implications that would be lost if the symbol became its referent.
When you call a rabbit a smeerp, you say little other than ‘this is different, somehow’. It’s a juvenile bit of telling.
(A frequent complaint about Eifre Quest is my incessant use of intimidating insect anatomical jargon. Instead of foot, I say ‘tarsus’, instead of finger I say ‘dactyl’. Indeed, for all my varied and consistent use of expressions, the meaning gotten across is sometimes little more than, as one reader put it, ‘a bug did a bug thing’. This is often defensible (a mandible is not lips or teeth; an antenna is an antenna), and in every case it’s something readers can look up — though dactyl is an odd one out; insects don’t have dactyls (though they do have pulvilli). I made them up, when I could have just said ‘finger’. I could defend it and say all fantasy fics have aesthetic commitments (consider Sanderson’s refusal to use swears), but this is, as I termed above, falsely alien. They are really just fingers.)
Strange jargon is not needed to invoke difference: the name for the technique is defamiliarization. Often used for more highbrow literary ends than making fantasy monsters creepy, but the tools are worth studying.
All said, this rounds out our first section, and has brought us the first tenet of xenodeterminism: any truly faithful depiction of an alien mind is always an exercise in poetry and conlanging.
Writing manuals often include exercises. I never do them, and I don’t know who does. They presumably exist, and for them, the exercises I’d recommend are:
- Pick a perceptual primitive (ideally sight, touch, or taste. smell or taste would be too easy (and arguably bad writing), while space or time might be nightmare difficulty.) Write a passage without metaphors from that sense, or make a copy and edit something you have written to remove reference to it.
- Invent a sense, and come up with metaphors for it. Verbs, adjectives, and idiomatic phrases. If stuck, look for common metaphors in other sense, and consider how to reframe them in your invented sense.
Values
Hume’s guillotine says you can’t get an ought from an is. It’s not quite true; every ‘is’ is an ‘ought’; the implacture of every statement of fact is the assertion that you should believe it, that you should find them meaningful, that, ultimately, you should hold concepts like truth and reality. The guillotine is more of a social reality, that reasonable agents can agree on what’s true, but what’s good cannot be established only by reference to what’s true. To the extent this is meaningful for an agent in isolation, it’s no more than the observation that orthogonal statements exist. ‘Murder is bad’ cannot tell you whether theft is bad, and nor can ‘you should believe 2+2=4’.
Orthogonality like this, applied to xenos, results in the observed phenomena of blue and orange morality. But a different, and I feel clearer, way to frame it is checkerboard morality. Because ‘blue’ and ‘orange’ don’t fit with a black and white or grayscale metaphor for morality — this is a broken analogy, because there are no ‘blue’ actions, no acts outside of our moral evaluation.
You can see this in how B&O is defined. It’s not that B&O aliens are doing anything fundamentally different, it’s that they’re doing something incongruous, variegated. Sometimes the ‘blue’ action is ‘good’, and sometimes the ‘blue’ action is ‘bad’. It’s less that this requires a different axis than if you took a grayscale spectrum, cut it up and shuffled the pieces around. Hence, checkerboard. Things we’d considered morally black placed beside things we’d consider morally white.
Many won’t like to hear this, but I find that, despite being what most would intellectually associate with xenofiction, alien values are an underappreciated part of it in practice. I’ve gotten compliments for the alienness of my characters, and I’ve put no special effort into giving them a outré moral outlook. (Indeed, I’ve done the opposite; I’m skeptical that a predator like a mantis would be nearly as social as a human, yet I write them that way in Eifre Quest for the sole reason of reader sympathy.)
But if I were putting in the work I would, because there are many things humans care about that xenos would not — in fact, the problem runs deeper. There are things modern humans, WEIRD humans, care about that most humans would not. Most fantasy writers can hardly accurately reflect a medieval attitudes, so an alien mindset is a true challenge.
Furthermore, I think you need some measure of materialism to write a proper xeno — if deep down, you believe human moral behavior is a response to some metaphysical order of the universe, rather than chiefly an instinctive response to social stimuli, you’re going to run into a problem where your xenos recapitulate human morality — or at best, fit neatly in its frame, as something easily mapped to our reference.
Values are, more than either of the other pillars, an exercise in introspection and lateral thinking. Taking an action, a goal, a thought, stripping it of its intuitiveness and reducing it to reasoning and assumptions. It’s not special — anyone with functioning theory of mind realizes others have different preferences. Anyone who’s argued about politics can realize people can ground justifications in fundamentally different places. This, then, is less an insight than a reminder. “Would a nonhuman actually X?” is a question I’m repeatedly startled to realize I never considered when someone asks me.
To return to the checkerboard analogy, and hopefully get something more useful than “uh, think about whether your xeno would actually like, do it?”, it provides a quick starting point for generating alien moral preferences. Put black next to white and gray. What’s something humans {do, don’t} care about that this xeno {doesn’t, does}? What’s something humans {hate, love} that this xeno {strives for, can’t stand}? Better questions — what’s something the xeno agrees with humans about, but for completely different reasons? What preference does it share, yet takes to a greater or broader extreme than humans, making us look like hypocrites?
And more importantly, how would you notice? What actual behavior would this cash out in, that can only be understood by groking its values?
With the mention of behavior, it’s time to move on to the next section, but for those with the inclination, treat those questions as the exercise.
Acts, et cetera
This has been, perhaps, the hardest section to conceptualize. Beyond xenosenses and xenovalues, there is generally two others facets worth speaking of. We might call these “capabilities” and “qualities”. That is, different things that a xeno can do, and things that can be done to them differently. This is the distinction between having, say, claws that can rend metal and scales that could stop bullets. I roll these into one category primarily because any other way I can think to split it — between “voluntary” acts and “involuntary” facts, between “active” actions upon the world and “passive” reactions to the world — seem like they unnecessarily imply things about a xeno must relate to the world. To us, speaking our mind, healing a wound, feeling the pull of gravity, all seem like different things, not all of them we’d call “actions” we “do.” But, per reductionism, what difference is there?
Framed this way, a model of a xeno could be said to simply be a function. Its senses are the functions’ arguments, its values are the functions body, and its actions are the functions’ output. Less technically, senses are the world affecting the xeno, values are the xeno affecting itself, and acts are the xeno affecting the world.
Definitional sputtering aside, I think acts are the facet there are the least productive things to say. Not because it’s less important than the other two, but because I suspect writers in general do not need help on this front. Science fiction and fantasy has not failed to produce an endless parade of xenos with strange and fascinating anatomy. After all, one might guess “just humans in costumes” would not be so outstanding a criticism if the costumes weren’t effectively alien.
More than that, a part of my inability to say more here is that I’m shackled to the (lack of) assumptions I’ve made until now. There are a lot of types of xenos you could write, most saliently, aliens and robots. But there’s an acute difference between an evolved agent and an agent unconstrained by evolution. Now, any artificial being the exists long enough is subject to selection (it’s just the tautology that things which can better persist tend to persist), but the principles to design an evolutionarily plausible xeno are different from the principles to design a xeno crafted by anothers’ will.
Having spoken of the evolutionary assumption, now, we can apply to our prescriptions for designing our pillars. In many ways, they are quite routine. A xeno’s senses must be those which enhance its survival. It is unlikely for it to receive information it cannot act on. More strikingly (though on reflection, obvious), evolution does not favor accuracy. An agent’s perceptions will be distorted, if that distortion leads to more persistent behavior.
Likewise, an agents values will favor its own persistence. Of all the ground retreaded in this essay, this is one of the most widely talked about. The values which favor persistence are known as the Omohundro drives, or the basic AI drives, and are a corollary of the orthogonality thesis, that ultimate morality is decoupled from intelligence (defined, perhaps circularly, as capability of achieving goals).
What’s more productive to absorb is how the three pillars must harmonize among themselves under constrain of selection pressure.
Acts imply senses. In order for a xeno to act, it must have the information on which to act, and should have information to tune and receive feedback on said actions. This is, broadly construed, the principle of required secondary powers, especially in the context of magical abilities. If a xeno has electrical manipulation, it likely needs electrical senses. The opposite should also hold: if you shrink the pool of actions a xeno has relative to a human (if they are sessile, for instance), senses should also shrink (at least those instrumental in motion).
Senses imply values. In part, this is the by-now trivial observation that a xeno’s senses should be distorted towards things which are most relevant to its persistence and terminal goals. But it goes beyond that: senses imply aesthetics. You can reason this by analogy: if we humans have pleasing patterns, pleasing senes, pleasing smells, then surely an electrical eel will find electrical currents it enjoys feeling, a bat will engineer acoustics that reflect their echolocation just so. This general idea is borne out in a paper so commonly cited on this blog, Driven by Compression Progress, which defines beauty as compression and intrigue as the first derivative of compressibility. This gives a basis for, to a crude extent, what tendencies will affect a xeno’s aesthetics. Perhaps the eels prefer regular currents, or those of many patterns overlapping like the soundwaves of a chordic triad.
Values imply acts. This is, I think, the deepest point of all. In the book The Psychopath Code (an engrossing, compellingly written read whose actual conclusions I find myself skeptical of) Hintjens lays out a model of emotions that should be very instructive to a xenofiction writer.
In fact, let’s devote the next section to the that.
Emotions
Emotions, Hintjen claims, are tools, adaptations to solve specific problems. His breakdown proposes two ends an emotion can serve. First is the most obvious: signaling. What does crying accomplish, but to communicate through body language? But the second is more important to us: orchestration. What does fear accomplish? When excited, when your heartbeat accelerates and your eyes widen, your body is preparing itself to act. In so many emotional presentations, there are changes in the metabolism and bodily processes to ready a certain behavior. I call this the orchestration principle.
If you read over Hintjen’s list of primary emotions, he claims are over 50 of them, but you see a very definite pattern reflected across many of the groups (Hintjens divides them into predator/defense/sexual/family/tribal/social).
The general suite tends to be along the lines of:
- A desire emotion as a response to some deficiency or opportunity. Desire causes us to look for ways to fulfill some need.
- A reaction emotion triggered by a new circumstance, a incoming threat or a problem to solve. Reaction gets us ready to act.
- A pursuit emotion that drives one after one particular chance to fulfill a need. Pursuit starts when you see a way to fulfill a need, or defend from a threat.
- A progress emotion that rewards one getting closer to fulfilment. Progress keeps us focused on the current course of action.
- A success emotion experienced when the need is at least fulfilled, or the threat subdued. It’s the reward.
- A followup emotion concerned with the aftermath of the need. Defending the prey you just brought down from scavengers, or expressing submission after a failed dominance display.
- A failure emotion that copes with a pursuit gone awry. It often consists of reflection, ruminating on memories of what happened and things to do differently, to learn.
For an illustration, I’ll borrow some of Hintjens’s terminology — this mainly for those who haven’t go and read the original chapter themselves. First, we can imagine a predator will feel hunger, prompting it to seek out prey. Hunger means slower digestion, sharper senses, a certain focus. Perhaps it feels a need to move, but slowly and carefully, stealthed to ambush prey, and its breathing is regular. When it spots that prey, it feels obsession. Metabolism gets ready for digestion, eyes fixated on the target. Adrenaline flows, and the brain records detailed memory. It will close in, remaining hidden until the last moment. When it finally leaps, it feels euphoria as it gives chase. Tunnel vision, accelerating breathing and heartrate, wide eyes, teeth bared. When the prey stumbles, when it gets a chance to go in for the kill, it feels glee. Blood flows to the limbs, mouth opens to bite. Attacking the prey, it feels fury. Sense of pain dulls, eyes narrow for protection, the ears fold back, breath exhales to tighten the chest to avoid broken ribs. This turns into bloodlust as the prey dies, and hands and jaw clenches to restrain it. Heart and lungs work to clean up the waste productions from the exertion, and the digestive system gets ready for food. Gluttony comes next, preparing the prey, as the predator feels anxious of competitors who might steal it. It might move the meal to safe location before diving in. The mouth wets with saliva, and it licks its lips. Satiation comes when it’s eaten enough. Saliva production is reduced, and it may reject or share what remains of the meal. It relaxes, goes limp. Alternatively, if the hunt had failed, it would feel blocked, retreating to a safe place and the memories replaying over and over, imagining and rehearsing ‘what if’ scenarios.
Similar scenarios play out in the prey’s body (it experiences surprise at a sudden threat or suspense at the signs of a possible threat. This becomes terror as it prepares to run, then flight. Or it stands its ground, and feels anger as it defies and displays its own threat, and rage as it attacks, then triumph as dominance is asserted. Or, if flight or rage fails, it turns to shock as it prepares to die or play dead. In a dominance display, this is instead defeat as it expresses submission.), and likewise in either partner of a sexual escapade (it begins with ennui, until something catches their interest, and they express desire that accelerates into lust and then arousal as intercourse begins, then climax and replete. Or instead, along the way, perhaps it is rejected.)
The interpersonal emotions Hintjens outlines are more complex, and much more signaling-heavy. It would bog down this section to summarize two dozen more emotions, even in this abbreviated form. To my eye, the signaling emotions show so much less obvious structure, and I suspect this reveals incompleteness in Hintjens’ model. The predator/defense/sexual emotions outline a complete flow chart for the process of obtaining food, reacting to threats, or finding mates. But though there are emotions like love or amusement, there is no comparable action flow-chart among the tribal or social emotions. Perhaps this is symptomatic of these emotions being so much more recently evolved, and not honed to completeness like ancient predator reactions — but The Psychopath Code is not a treatise on general psychology, and its exposition on emotions is something conveniently instructive but incidental to its true subject matter.
In a certain sense, a signaling emotion is no more than an emotion which orchestrates itself. Or rather, whose means are achieved in orchestration. If anger prepares you to defend, then sadness prepares you to cry. It happens that defending yourself is a valid tactic to deter predators and competitors, and it happens that crying elicits sympathy. Are they any different, on a fundamental level?
So I think my schematic model is quite adequate when extended to signaling emotions. How does this all apply to writing xenos, though?
In practice, there are two ways a creating alien emotional palettes. One is altering the presentation and strength of existing emotions. At the superficial level, this is something I am adept at: when writing insects with antennae and mandibles and palps, or dragons with wings and flexible tongues, there are so many new dimensions of body language opened up. My logic in assigning meanings to these gestures is unconsciously derived from similar ideas to the orchestration principle. My insects curl up their antennae when threatened, much as animals might fold back their ears; antennae extending outward to touch or scent, expressing curiosity. Importantly, these gestures do something, in a practical sense, however minor. Think of this as an extension of the metaphor theory outlined in the Senses section. Every word of a language no matter how abstract ultimately grounds itself in metaphor somewhere along its etymology, and body language is simply anatomical metaphor. A predator’s glee, as Hintjens remarks, looks a lot like a primal ancestor of happiness.
The other tool to use here is creating a suite of new emotions centered around new or pronouncedly developed special need that characterizes your xeno. Consider under what situations your xeno would feel this desire for this need, or what would trigger a reaction to some occurence. What would they need to do in pursuit of it? What would they do as they make progress on it? What would they need to when they succeed and as a followup? What would they do if they experience failure?
What they “do”, keep in mind, is both physical (breathing and heartrate, body language, and whatever weird alien processes they have), and mental — the things they focus on or don’t, the salience of their senses.
Those who have long studied very general narrative models like the story circle may have noticed a certain familiarity in my general emotional schematic. (If not, perhaps peruse my thoughts on plot theories?). The sequence of emotions closely parallels the steps of a very stripped down hero’s journey. In the story circle, those steps begin with a character who first wants something, then goes to get it, searches for it, finds it, takes it, and at last returns, having changed. (I’ve even encountered an inverse model for characters who don’t necessarily change: a character has a strength, gets pushed on it, resists, loses, questions themselves, recalls their strength, and then grows.)
In our emotional schematic process follows a similar pattern: a predator feels desire, then pursuit, then progress, then success, then followup. This becomes a story if you insert an instance of failure, perhaps after pursuit (where it would naturally go in many story circles or four act models). I point this out because, besides an inherent intrigue of the possibility it raises that stories exist to run us through a complete emotion process, this gives a starting point for thinking about the culture of a society of xenos. If a xeno has its own more or less unique process according its distinct needs, one may expect their culture to include entire genres of stories built around the narrative structure they imply.
More ambitiously, yet also practically, once we step outside the realm of pure worldbuilding and actually try to write stories with our xenos, these emotional processes become important for conceptualizing alien arcs and character development.
The mention of culture perhaps warrants a last sidebar for the question of different cultures. It’d be hard enough to create one xeno culture, but not all human cultures are the same. A frequent problem in speculative fiction is races and species with one culture across the all of them. An old, suspiciously-phrased insight of mine is that “species is the problem, culture is the solution”. Put simply, if vampires have to drink blood to survive, that’s a fact about the species, and how they view blood and blood-havers is a fact about the culture. It can vary, but the general tendency is that the culture is selected to enable its adherents desires and solve their problems. Absent a greater reason, vampires aren’t going to have a culture of “blood is bad” — they need blood. They will, however, certainly have culturally unique stories and rituals around the drinking of blood. Really, ritual is such a deep topic that xenoritual probably warrants its own section in a truly complete essay — but this thing is already so long, and I’m tired. Concisely, one might observe that a collected body of rituals can be other of an abstracted and interpersonalized emotional process of its own.
Ultimately, to get the most difference with the least work, I would say the most important part of writing a good xeno lies not in giving it weird senses or wacky anatomy or strange ways of thinking, it’s in giving it fundamental needs (or lack of needs) that a human doesn’t have, and emotional responses to those needs producing behavior a human consequently would not perform. New senses and body language can give you a very, very good costume, but to truly avoid “human in a costume”, you need to make it want new things, such that if you did put a human in that costume, they would act differently.
Interlude: Recommendations
An earlier draft of this essay linked a work I feel does particularly well with alien emotions and cultures: the Agloanikoi in Species Shock. This was deleted along with the surrounding section which detailed the psychology of my own diamantids as an explanatory example of emotional process theory. (Though if you’re curious, I’ve expanded that section into its own post, and I’m quite proud of it.)
Anyway, it now seems odd that I’d recommend one work and nothing else, so I suppose I’ll also mention Little Leavanny in the Big City as a work which applies the principles of xenofiction to writing pokémon, and the works of Morgan “Nighzmarquls” Heacock, foremost among them Onward to Providence, an epic-length, episodic shipping trip through galaxy running on alternate physics and filled with alien life.Despite (or perhaps because of) being driven by human players, the quest Insatiable is an amusing adventure of a Kingdom Hearts heartless, a creature driven by a desire to consume hearts.
Among professionally published works, many of Peter Watts work, such as Blightsight or the short story “The Things”, stand out by far. “Love is the Plan, the Plan is Death” is commonly recommended, and I find it quite exceptional though my feelings are slightly mixed. Raptor Red, if scientifically dated, is another I recommend. Someone probably expects me to say Children of Time, too, but I suspect the venn diagram of people who read this essay and people who know about Children of Time is a circle.
I’ve no doubt forgotten your favorite influence piece of xenofiction, and may have even read it — if you bring it to my attention, I’ll think about amending this list.
With that naked bit of shilling aside though, let’s bring this overwrought essay to a close. Thanks for sticking with me through all of this, by the way.
Coda
Xenodeterminism, as I have outlined, is the assertion that a xeno is defined by its senses, its values, and its acts. A sense is the world affecting the agent, a long list of questions like “what color am I looking at?” or “what configuration is my body in?” that the xeno knows the answer to. A value if-then procedure, mechanics for its own state evolving: “if in danger, prepare to fight or flee;” “if I’m hungry, look for food”. An act is how the xeno affects the world, both through the details of its anatomy and the volition of its plans.
With the assumption that a xeno arose through or is subject to selection pressure of some kind, we can assume a xeno has required secondary powers and follows the Omohundro drives, and we can outline flow-chart like emotional processes that the xeno engages to pursue its values.
Maybe I’ve said little that’s really new throughout all of this, but I hope that systematizing it like this allows for more rigorous reasoning about what is and is not valid for your xeno. The enemy, recall, is the falsely familiar and the falsely alien. So long as you are aware of how your xeno is different from a human in its senses, values, and acts, and all the implications thereof, you should fear no falsity. That’s the rub, though, isn’t it? We don’t have a full schematic (I certainly couldn’t produce one) for the sense/value/acts of humanity as a whole, and none of us are logically omniscient. It’s all easier said than done, but I think an outline gives a workable approximation.
All said, I think the note I’ll end on is that, while I believe what I’ve written here will tell you how to write a xeno, I don’t believe that’s more than instrumentally useful in writing xenofiction.
Xenofiction is not about writing nonhumans, any more than rational fiction is about internal consistency. Xenofiction is about humans, specifically, about how humans relate to your story. I used to be annoyed at how many works of xenofiction featured humans, but that was because I didn’t actually want xenofiction — Xenofiction is when nonhuman experience contrasts human experience, defamiliarizing it and highlighting its exceptional aspects. The prevalence of humans, then, is no more surprising than the prevalence of murders in mystery stories, or magic systems in rational stories. If it’s about how different your nonhumans are from humans, then what better way to show that than to have a human for scale?