Category: Worldbuilding

The alien lexicon

Alien languages, we can assume, will function more or less like human ones. They may have different sets of sounds, different grammatical rules, but they all have the same purpose: to communicate. It’s really what they communicate about that’s where worldbuilding meets language-building.

Personally, I’m not a big fan of the theories stating that a language influences its speakers’ thoughts to the point where they are unable to understand or even imagine those things the language can’t say. If that were strictly true, loanwords would be all but impossible. No, the brain is more complex than that. We can make new words (or borrow existing ones) for new ideas. That’s kinda the whole point of derivation.

But it’s aliens

Now, when you throw aliens into the mix, things change. Their brains likely won’t work the same way as ours. They’ll still be associative, probably, but the associations they make will be far removed from what we know. So it’s entirely possible that they will have words that literally have no translation into human tongues, and vice versa. Different environments, different evolution, different biology will all play a role in this, so it’s up to you to know how your aliens “work”. Only then can you decide what words they’ll have.

Clearly, any word for a terrestrial species won’t have a direct translation, unless you have some serious backstory going on. (On the other hand, for a fantasy race, such as elves, it’s entirely acceptable and expected that they’ll know the same plants and animals humans do.) But take a step back. Look at the wider world.

Those things not affected by the differing biology of aliens can be relatable. It’s not hard to see that they’d have words for astronomical phenomena (sun, moon, planets, etc., depending on their homeworld’s specifics), though they’ll probably have different cultural connotations. An Earthlike planet, similarly, will have weather—weather much like Earth’s—so there will be an array of weather terms: rain, snow, cloud, wind, and so on. Other things that aren’t tied to the biosphere can also cross this divide: chemical elements, fire, water, mountains, oceans. Essentially anything in the “non-living” sciences works here.

It’s with biology and its subgenres that the real fun begins. Your aliens will have their own names for their own animals, plants, body parts, occupations, and cultural paraphernalia, among other things. Some of these can be related to our own: if an alien calls the part of its body it talks out of a “glorb”, it’s a safe bet you can translate that as “mouth”. Others…not so much. Imagine, for instance, an alien race capable of seeing into the infrared. Those guys will have a whole host of color words that make no sense to us at all. A species of eight-legged bug people might have special names for those extra limbs, but we’d refer to them all as “legs”. If they’re lucky, we might divide them into “forelegs” and “hindlegs”, but we’re not going to recognize the nuances.

Really, designing an alien conlang’s lexicon is more an exercise in defining its culture than anything. In that regard, yes, language influences thought. But from a designer’s perspective, let’s look at it the other way around. How do your aliens think? What makes them special, compared to the humans of Earth? Let those questions, among others, be your guide. Find the ways aliens differ, because that’s where their lexicon will be, well, alien.

First contact

It is easy to go too far here, however. Much of the language will be somewhat compatible with a terrestrial tongue. It may not be exact, but it won’t be too much worse than translating between two wildly different natural languages. Our six thousand get up to some pretty crazy stuff already, especially in the vocabulary department. Even if we don’t have a perfect translation, we’ll figure something out.

If you’re making an alien conlang for a story, it’s almost a certainty that you’ll have some kind of “first contact” situation. There, if the aliens are at all like us, they’ll know to keep things simple. Diplomatically speaking, it’s best to adjust your level of speech to that of your listener, particularly when the wrong word could spark an interstellar war or something of that sort. So you don’t have to go overboard on the “alien words for alien things” bit. Sprinkle in a few words here and there to make them feel otherworldly—names for weapons or lesser alien species are a good choice for this—and call it a day. Everything else will have a reasonable interpretation in English or your natural language of choice.

However you go about it, the lexicon is a great place to really drive home the otherness of an alien race. Most readers and viewers won’t bother figuring out the finer points of grammar or making sense of the strange sounds emanating from alien mouths. The words, by contrast, are right there. They’re front and center, most notably when an alien speaker drops one into casual conversation, like they do in every sci-fi movie or TV show ever. In some cases, that might be your only opportunity to flesh out a culture or world that wouldn’t otherwise get screen time, so take advantage of it.

On ancient times

The medieval era gets a lot of screen time, and for good reason. Medieval Europe has a kind of romantic appeal, with its knights and chivalry and castles, its lack of guns and bombs and cars and planes. It’s our collective nostalgic getaway. Fantasy, of course, revels in the Middle Ages; the “default” fantasy setting is England circa 1200, at the height of the era. But any kind of fiction can take us to medieval times. We have our Game of Thrones and Lord of the Rings, yes, but also our Vikings and The Last Kingdom, our Braveheart and Excalibur.

But what about earlier times? What about the days before the castles and cathedrals were built, before knights wrote their code of chivalry? What about the ancient era?

Defining the ancient

First, let’s define what we mean by “ancient”. We can consider the Middle Ages to end in 1453, with the fall of Constantinople; the refugees fleeing into Europe from that city sparked the Renaissance. The beginning of the era, however, is harder to characterize. That’s mostly because of the Dark Ages, those centuries where nothing much happened. (Except when it did.) Records are fairly scanty in the period before Charlemagne—before about 800—but I think we can all agree that the Roman Empire really was ancient. Thus, the year of its fall in the west, 476 AD, marks a good boundary between the ancient and the medieval.

So we’ll say ancient times ended in 476. When did they begin? That’s a difficult question that gets to the heart of anthropology. Suffice to say, the ancient era began with human civilization. Even if you’d prefer to subdivide (Bronze Age, Classical Era, etc.), its all ancient.

That leaves us with a grand sweep of history, possibly as much as ten thousand years! In our modern, fast-paced world, that seems like an eternity. Indeed, it is a long time, no matter how you look at it, and things changed remarkably from the beginning of the era to the end. Fifth-century Rome was nothing like Homer’s Athens, and neither really resembled Sargon’s Babylon from the eighth century BC, or Middle Kingdom Thebes a millennium before that, or the Stone Age settlement of Çatalhöyük. (Jericho has been occupied almost continuously since the beginning of the ancient era, and you can bet it went through a number of different looks through the ages.)

Writing an ancient-times work requires you to know the period. For the big names—Rome, Greece, Egypt, Mesopotamia—that’s relatively easy. These cultures all left a large body of written knowledge, in addition to easily excavated structures. We know a lot about how they lived, so a writer has more than enough to work with. Lesser-known peoples, such as the Etruscans, Harappans, or Picts, are much harder. Quite a few are only attested in a few sites, and those may be impossible to fully grasp. (On the other hand, that means no one can complain that you screwed up your history!)

The ancient world

Whichever part of Antiquity you choose as your setting, you’ll have to get to know the world. The hardest part is seeing what little you have to work with. Technology, for instance, is such an important part of our times that it’s hard enough to imagine the medieval world, with its lack of…well, everything we take for granted. And ancient times were even worse in that regard. At the earliest, we’re talking about days when the wheel was the height of invention. The reason the Iron Age is called the Iron Age is because it’s defined by the working of iron. For ancient smiths, that was awfully hard as it was; steel was literally impossible.

But the ancients (especially the Romans) made great advances in their own right. Rome, of course, invented concrete, while the Egyptians built the pyramids and the Greeks had all their grand wonders. China built a Great Wall that, like the Maginot Line, never really lived up to its promise. These cultures of old also developed early sciences (the Greeks were pretty good at geometry, as you probably know) and quite a few other things. Our modern legal system also owes a lot to the Roman one, filtered through the Middle Ages though it was.

One part of life rises above everything else in the ancient world: religion. Every ancient culture placed a heavy focus on matters of religion. In fact, it’s often hard to untangle religion from other fields, because it permeated life. Science, government, art, and literature were all tools used for religion’s purposes. And it’s not hard to see why. When the world is so much bigger than you, than anything you know, and when it’s so wild and untamed compared to ours, where can you find any form of safety? Religion was so important that most archaeological sites are practically assumed to be religious in nature until proven otherwise.

Besides the sacred, many other forces worked to shape the ancient world. Remember that we’re dealing with a time before modern industry, but also before the developments of the Middle Ages. People had to look to their basic needs first: food, water, shelter. Survival. Only once they were certain they could survive could they work to thrive. Most people didn’t make it that far, however. Subsistence farming was a way of life. So was hunting and gathering, a practice preserved in only a very few spots today. Only a select few rose above that. True, there were more “middle-class” people in the great cities, particularly towards the end of the era, but urban life was for the 1%.

Travel was hard. Communities were small. People could go their whole lives—much shorter than our own, on average—without leaving their homeland. But that was probably for the best, as danger lurked everywhere. Disease, predators (on two legs or four), war, famine—all these can be subsumed under the one word that best describes the foreign: uncertainty.

The city on the hill

Rome was the big exception to this. Romans made a habit of being worldly, urbane, sophisticated. Their empire, as horrible as we’d consider it today, was the apex of ancient civilization. It removed the uncertainties of life in the era, replacing them with the rule of law, with connections and bureaucracy and, well, government. Earlier cultures built roads to connect towns, but Rome took that to an extreme. Aqueducts existed long before the Appian was built, but we associate these creations with the Romans because they perfected the art through repeated practice.

A story set in Imperial (or even Republican) Rome will still have most of the same aspects as something from earlier Antiquity, but it can also show a different way of life, one which has much more in common with our own. That’s probably why it has some of the best representation in fiction, including:

  • The HBO series Rome (naturally)
  • Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, required reading for high-school English classes
  • Spartacus, whether in its original movie form or the stylized TV series from a few years ago
  • Ben-Hur, recently remade as a box-office flop
  • Passion of the Christ, because the birth of Christianity came in a corner of the Roman Empire

By contrast, other ancient cultures show up less often in modern media. The Greeks get endless retellings of Alexander, the Iliad, and the wars against the Persians (e.g., 300). Ancient Egypt gets fanciful flicks like Exodus: Gods and Kings and The Scorpion King. Mesopotamia is almost totally limited to Biblical stories such as Noah. (In books, things are a little better, if only because you don’t have to spend money on costumes and set design.)

It’s entirely possible to write a story about the ancient world. It’ll take research and thought, as well as the capability to imagine a time so alien to anything we know. It’s been done before, though, and there are good stories to tell. Not just the Caesars and the Constantines, or Jesus or the Jews. Antiquity comprises an entire world far larger than our own, a world in the process of being formed.

Magic and tech: safety and security

Despite what you may hear from TV and other sources of news, the world we live in today is the safest there’s ever been. Those of us living in the modern, industrialized West enjoy a level of personal, private, and public safety that would make earlier ages green with envy. Some of that comes from philosophy, from political science and enlightened ideas about the responsibilities of good government. With the representative democracies that make up most of Europe and North America, we’re all invested in the safety of everyone. An attack on one of us is an attack on all of us.

But technology also plays an important role in keeping us protected, on allowing us to live our lives free of the fears of random violence or other threats. Say what you will about them, but guns are a sufficient deterrent in many instances. But this isn’t the only form of technological security. Look at crash helmets, airbags, or even knee pads—all inventions created to keep us safe from incidental harm.

Science of safety

Today, we’re seeing a lot of talk about safety and security. Before we can look at them, though, we need to distinguish these two terms. Security, as I see it, is active protection from external threats, looking out for the things that might hurt you and dealing with them. Safety is more like not having those threats in the first place, or mitigating their causes in such a way that they never have the chance to harm you in the first place. Both of these aspects are intertwined, however.

Most technology deals with both ends of this spectrum at the same time. Take, for instance, collision avoidance. It’s a safety feature, in that its whole point is to steer you away from the possibility of a crash. But it can also be an active security system: if another car cuts you off, it can avoid that potential crash, too. Some of the more advanced systems can also stop you from causing an accident, by creating a negative feedback in steering or simply ignoring your movements of the wheel completely.

Safety and security aren’t limited to electronic assistance. They go back to the beginning of time. Any non-hunting weapon (or hunting weapon used for self-defense) is an implement of security. So are bodyguards and even standing armies. Public policies dating back to the age of Rome and before instituted measures of safety, from sanitation standards to traffic ordinances to weapons bans. (Whether these worked, of course, is a matter of debate.)

Socially speaking, there are also two ways we can look at safety. First, we can take it into our own hands. Anyone who owns a gun, has an alarm system, or even wears a seatbelt is doing exactly this. By following what we perceive to be “best practices”, we can make ourselves as safe as we wish. If X will harm you, then you try to put yourself in a position where X can’t get to you.

The alternative (not that they are mutually exclusive) is to put your trust in another. We also do that all the time. The whole point of a society based on the rule of law is that someone, somewhere, is responsible for the safety of the public. Whether that’s a king, president, or whatever you like, it doesn’t matter. Someone is looking out for you. We can’t protect against every threat, so we delegate to them.

Safety in magic

Most of our best safety and security comes from technology, whether that’s guns, cameras, anti-virus programs, or just a combination lock. Since we’ve established that magic can replace an awful lot of tech, we have to wonder: can magic make people safer?

Well, we’ve already seen a couple of realms where it does: medicine and self-defense. That’s proof enough of the merit of magical security. But how much further can we take this?

If your magic system allows shields of force (for this series, ours doesn’t, but bear with me), then that right there is a great example. Something like that would become extremely popular, especially if it’s not that hard to make. A single charm or enchantment that makes you all but immune to weapons, blunt trauma, falling, and the elements? You’d be crazy not to get one. But let’s say you’re working with something a little more low-key, like we are. We don’t have the luxury of an easy illustration of the power of magical security, so we’ll have to look at a few other possibilities.

We have an amplifying spell. A crafty mage can take this and turn it around. Instead of a speaker making his voice louder, a wary person can make ambient sounds louder. Sounds like, say, someone creeping through the bushes. It’s a primitive, but useful, security microphone. From the same earlier entry in this series, we also see a ventriloquist effect that can serve as a helpful bit of misdirection. If they think you’re over there, but you’re really here, those dangerous enemies will be out of position, giving you time to strike or run away.

Magical power, whether electrical or motive, gives us the opportunity to create such things as self-locking doors and electrified fences. Metallurgy, improved by the arcane arts, makes it easier to forge heavy, secure locks, but also the delicate keys needed to open them. A mage’s invisible markings can be used as fingerprinting or watermarking: a secure method of verifying the identity of a message’s sender. On the safety side, we have, of course, medicine and sanitation as the big winners, but they’re not the only ones.

Magic, and the scientific, empirical mindset it’s bringing to our fictional realm, will make many areas safer. From the grand (weather forecasting) to the mundane (washing hands), as our magical society becomes more advanced, it will seek out ways to keep its populace safe and secure. Sometimes, this may go too far—the seemingly inexorable slide of our own world into a surveillance state is an example—but one can hope the mages are smarter.

Safe and sound

If you’ll recall, our magical kingdom is, technologically speaking, still in the late medieval era. The added magic, however, is bringing it up to near-modern levels. Part of that advancement is in making people safer. If you do that, they live longer, healthier, better lives. They become more productive, and you eventually get that positive reinforcement that can explode into modernity. All you have to do is take some of the danger out of the world. Once the existential threats are no longer, people can begin to make themselves better.

Building aliens: environment

Everything that lives lives somewhere. All organisms exist in an environment of some sort. It may not necessarily be what we think of when we hear the word “environment”, but that’s merely our human bias creeping in. Animals live in a specific environment. So do plants. So do extremophile bacteria, though theirs and ours have essentially nothing in common. Aliens, too, will be found in a certain environment, but which one is very dependent on their evolution.

The nature of Nature

For a long time, scientists and philosophers wrestled with the question of how much an organism’s environment affects its life, the so-called “Nature vs. Nurture” debate. We know now that there is no debate, that both have an impact, but let’s focus on the Nature half for now.

We, as humans, live mostly in temperate and tropical climates with moderate to heavy rainfall. We’re adapted to a fairly narrow band of temperatures, but our technology—clothes, air conditioning, etc.—augments our ability to survive and thrive in more hostile environments. Indeed, technology has let us travel to nearly lifeless regions, such as deep, dry deserts like the Atacama, the frozen wastes of interior Antarctica, and that most deadly environment of all: space.

But puny little us can’t live in such places. Not by ourselves. Other organisms are the same way, and they don’t have the benefit of advanced life-support machinery. So most of them are stuck where they are. Look through history, and you’ll see numerous accounts of wild animals (and indigenous people!) being captured and returned to an explorer’s homeland, where they promptly die.

Now, evolution’s very premise, natural selection, says that the most successful organisms are those best adapted to their environment. Thus, for an alien species, you want to know where it lives, because that will play a role in determining how viable your alien is. An aquatic animal isn’t going to survive very long in rain-shadow desert. Jungle trees won’t grow at 60° latitude. And the list goes on.

Components of an environment

A few factors go into describing the kind of life that can exist in a specific environment, or biome. Most of these boil down to getting the things life needs to perform its ultimate goals: survival and reproduction. For instance, all kinds of life require some form of energy. Plants get it from sunlight and photosynthesis, while animals instead eat things. The environment serves as a kind of backdrop, but it’s also an integral part of an organism’s survival, which is why life’s goals are better suited by becoming more adapted.

On a more useful level, however, we can look at a biome as an area having the following characteristics in about the same quantities:

  1. Temperature: Most species can only live effectively at a certain temperature. Too low, and things start to freeze; too high, and they boil. On Earth, of course, water is the primary limiting factor for temperature, though truly alien (i.e., not water-based) life will be constricted to somewhere near the range of its preferred chemical. (Not to say that freezing temperatures are an absolute barrier to life; penguins live just fine in subzero temps, for example.)

  2. Sunlight: This is the “energy” component I mentioned earlier. Assuming we’re dealing with a surface-dweller, sunlight is likely going to be the main type of incoming energy. That’s especially true for plants or other autotrophs, organisms which produce their own food. As any horticulturist knows, most plants are also highly adapted to a certain amount of sunlight. They’ll bloom only when the day is long enough, for example, or they’ll die if the nights grow too long, even if the temperature stays just fine.

  3. Proximity to water: I was going to label this as “precipitation”, but that turns out to be too specific. Water (or whatever your aliens use) is a vital substance. Every species requires it, and many absolutely must have a certain amount of it. If they, like plants, can’t move, then they must rely on water coming to them. That can fall from the sky as precipitation, or it can come across land in the form of tidal pools, or just about any other way you can think of.

  4. Predators and prey: If you remember old science classes, you know about the food chain. Well, that’s something all life has to worry about, if you’ll pardon the anthropomorphizing. Predators adapt to the presence of certain kinds of prey, and vice versa. Take one away, and things go out of whack. Species can overrun the land or go extinct.

Humans get away with a lot in this. Once again, that’s because of our intelligence and technology, and it’s reasonable to assume that a sapient alien race would overcome their own obstacles in much the same way. But everything else has to limp along without the benefits of higher thinking, so other species must adapt to their environment, rather than, essentially, bringing their own with them.

Great upheaval

All environments are constantly in flux. Climate changes, from season to season or millennium to millennium. Rainfall patterns shift, oceanic currents move, and that’s before you get into anything that may be caused by humanity. Then there are “transient” changes in environment, from wildfires to hurricanes to asteroid impacts. These can outright destroy entire habitats, entire biomes, but so can the slower, more gradual shifts. Those just give more warning.

When the environment changes beyond the bounds of a species, one of two things can happen. That species can adapt, or it will die. History and prehistory are littered with examples of the latter, from dodos to dire wolves. Adaptation, on the other hand, can often give rise to entirely new species, distinct from the old. (For an example, take any extant organism, because that’s how evolution works.)

An alien race will have its own history of environmental upheaval, entirely different from anything on Earth. A different series of major impacts, larger tidal effects from a bigger moon, massive solar flares…and that’s just the astronomical effects. Aliens will be the result of their own Mother Nature.

That’s where they become different. Even if they’re your standard, boring carbon-based lifeforms, even if their “animal” kingdom looks suspiciously like an alternate-color version of ours, they can still be inhuman. On Earth, one branch of the mammalian tree gave rise to primates, some of which got bigger brains. On another world, it could have been the equivalent of reptiles instead. Or birds. Or plants, but I’m not exactly sure how that’d work. One thing’s for sure, though: they’ll live somewhere.

Alien grammars

When making an “alien” conlang (however you define that), it’s easy to take the phonology half, make it outrageous, and call it a day. But that’s only half the battle. There’s more to a language than its sounds, and if you’re designing a conlang for anything more than naming, you still need to look at the grammar, too.

So how can we make the grammar of a language “feel” otherworldly? As with the sounds, the easiest way is to violate the traditional expectations that we, as speakers of human languages, have developed. To do this, however, we need to know our preconceptions, and we also need to take a look at how grammar really works.

The foundation of grammar

I can’t claim to understand the mental underpinnings of language. I bought a book about the subject years ago, but I’ve never had the chance to read it. What follows comes from articles, other conlangers, and a healthy dose of critical thinking.

Language is a means of communication, but it’s also inextricably linked to cognition, to memory. The human brain is a wonderful memory device (if you discount those pesky problems of fuzzy recollection, dementia, etc.) that works in a fascinating way. At its core, it seems to be primarily an associative memory. In other words, we remember things by their association with what we already know. Our language reflects that. Nouns are things, verbs are actions, adjectives are states or conditions; not for nothing are they all taught by means of pictures and examples. Those build the associations we use to remember them.

Is it possible that an alien intelligence doesn’t work this way? Sure, but that would be so “out there” that I can’t begin to contemplate it. If you want to try, go ahead, but it won’t be easy. On the other hand, that’s one way to get something totally different from what we know. I just wouldn’t want to try and describe it, much less use it.

Moving on to “actual” linguistics, we’re used to the traditional parts of speech, the trinity of noun, verb, and adjective. On top of them, we often toss in adverbs, articles, prepositions, and the like, but those aren’t quite as “core” as the big three. Indeed, many languages get by just fine without articles, including Latin and Japanese. Adverbs are so nebulously defined that you can find words in any language that fit their category, but there are plenty of examples of languages using adjectives in their place. Prepositions (more generally, adpositions) aren’t entirely necessary, either; most of their function can be replaced by a large set of case markers.

But it seems awfully hard to ditch any of the big three. How would you make a language without verbs, for instance? Like the “pure functional” approach to computer programming, it would appear that nothing could be accomplished, since there’s no way to cause changes. Similarly, a “nounless” conlang couldn’t name anything. For adjectives, it’s not so bad, as state verbs can already take their place in a few natural languages, but it’s difficult to imagine a total lack of them.

That hasn’t stopped industrious conlangers from trying. Languages without verbs/nouns/adjectives are a perennial favorite in any circle. I can’t say I’ve attempted one myself, but I can see how they might work, and any of the three looks very alien to me.

  • Getting rid of adjectives is the easiest. As above, most can be replaced by state verbs. A phrase like “the red door”, for instance, might come out as something like “the door that is red” or “the door it is red”. The difference is that adjectives are often (but not always) marked as if they were nouns, while a state verb like this would instead be conjugated like any other verb in the language.

  • Dropping verbs is much harder. You can look into languages that lack copular verbs for examples here, though the same idea can be extended to most of the “predicating” verbs, like English “to have”, “to become”, etc. Pronouns, case markers, and liberal use of adjectives can take care of most of it, but it’ll definitely feel weird.

  • Throwing out nouns is next to impossible, in my opinion. Not to say you should give up your ambitions, but…I’m not sure I can help you here. A language without nouns may truly be beyond our comprehension. Perhaps it’s the language of some mystical or super-advanced race, or that of a hive mind which has no need for names. I honestly don’t know.

Alternate universal

Much simpler than tossing entire categories of words is just finding new ways to use them. Most (I emphasize this for a reason) languages of the world follow a set of linguistic universals, as laid out by linguist Joseph Greenberg. They don’t follow all of them, mind you, but it’s better than even odds. Some of the more interesting ones include:

  • #3: VSO languages are prepositional. This comes from their “head-first” word order, but it’s easy to invert.
  • #14: In conditional clauses, the conclusion (“then” part) normally follows the condition (“if” part). Even in English, it’s not hard to find counterexamples, if you know where to look. (See what I did there?) But it’s not the usual form. In an alien conlang, it could be.
  • #34: Languages with a dual number must also have a plural; those with a trial (three of something) have a dual and a plural. No real reason this has to be so, not for aliens. I’d like to know how you justify it, though.
  • #38: Any language with case can only have a zero marker for the case representing an intransitive subject—nominative, absolutive, etc. If you’ve got a different way of distinguishing cases, then there’s no reason you have to follow this rule, right?
  • #42: All languages have at least three person and two number distinctions for pronouns. Another one where it’s not too hard to see the “alien” point of view.

Conclusion

Grammar is a huge field, and we’ve barely taken the first step into it. Even if you don’t make something completely outlandish as in the above examples, you can still create an alien grammar out of more mundane building blocks. There are thousands of languages in the world, and many have rare or unique features that could find a home in your alien conlang. A number for “a few”? Sure, it works for the Motuna language of Papua New Guinea. Want a case for things you’re afraid of? A few of the Aboriginal languages of Australia can help you there…if there are any native speakers left alive when you start. The list goes on for just about anything you could think of. All you have to do is look, because, linguistically, aliens are among us.

Magic and tech: art

Art is another one of those things that makes us human, and in more than one sense: some of the earliest evidence for human habitation comes in the form of artwork such as cave drawings or inscribed shapes on animal bones. As much as I hate to admit it (I failed art class in high school), we are artistic beings.

And art—specifically the visual arts such as painting, sculpture, etc.—has progressed through the ages. It has taken advantage of technological progress. Thus, there’s no reason why it wouldn’t also be affected by the development of magic. Although it may seem odd to consider art and science so intertwined, it’s not really that far out there.

The real way

Art history is practically a restatement of the history of materials. That’s our human nature coming out; almost the first thing we do with a newly developed article of clothing, for instance, is draw on it, or paint it, or dye it. Today, we’ve got fancy synthetics colored in thousands of different hues, but even our ancestors could do some remarkable things. Look at some of those Renaissance paintings if you don’t believe me.

What they had to work with was…not the same as what we use. Many of their paints and dyes were derived from plant or animal products, with a few popular pigments coming from minerals such as ochre. Their instruments were equally primitive. Pencils weren’t invented until comparatively recently, brushes were made from real animal hair (requiring a real animal to provide it), and those fancy feather quills we only use nowadays for weddings and The Price Is Right were once the primary Western tool for writing in ink.

For “3D” artwork, the situation was little better. Today, we have things like CNC mills and techniques to move mountains of metal or marble, but our ancestors made some of the most impressive monuments and structures in the world with little more than hammers and chisels. (In the Americas, they even built pyramids without metal tools. I couldn’t build a pyramid like that in Minecraft!)

Can magic help?

How would magic advance the world of art? Our usual approach of balls of stored elemental energy won’t do much, to be honest, but there is one way they could help, so we’ll get that out of the way first. Lighting has been a problem forever; getting it right is one of the hardest parts of a modern media production. (Supposedly, this is one of the reasons why the next season of Game of Thrones is delayed.) But we’ve already stated that magic can give us better artificial lights. Give them to artists, and you instantly make portraits that much better.

Other improvements are a little less obvious. Many mages will have an easy path to artistry, as the study of magic is as much art as science. It requires observational skills, creativity, and commitment—all the same qualities a good artist needs. And they can use personal spells to aid them. What artist wouldn’t want photographic memory, for example?

The materials will also benefit from the arcane, as we have seen. The earlier advent of chemistry means, among other things, better pigments. Upgraded tools allow for more exquisite and exotic sculpture. With the advanced crucibles and furnaces magic brings, our magical realm might see a boom in the casting of “harder” metals like iron or steel. Magical technology may also bring an increased emphasis on artistic architecture. All in all, the medieval realm will start to look a lot more like the Renaissance, if not more modern.

That’s not even including the entirely different styles of art magic makes possible. Maybe pyrotechnics displays (achieved through fire spells) become popular. Etching via jets of water is a modern invention, but the right system of magic might allow it centuries earlier. Welded sculptures? Why not? You can even posit a “magical” photograph apparatus, moving the whole genre of picture-taking several hundred years into the past. And it’s a small step from recording still images to recording a bunch of still images in succession, then playing them back at full speed, especially if you get a helping hand from a wizard.

Yes, I’m talking about movies. In a society outwardly based on medieval times. It’s a complex problem, but it’s not entirely infeasible. All you really need are two things. First, a projector, which magic can easily provide. (Hint: a magic light and a force-powered motor.) Second, film. That one’s a bit harder, but it only took a few decades for inventors to go from stills to moving pictures. There’s no reason why wizards couldn’t do the same thing, although they may be held up by the need for chemical advances to make a translucent photographic medium.

It’s magic

Magic is already art, but that doesn’t mean it can’t make the lives of artists easier and more interesting. It’s often been asked what a famous artist of the past (e.g., Leonardo da Vinci or Michelangelo) could create if they were given today’s tools. In a magical society, we can come one step closer to answering that question. And that’s with a low-magic setting. Imagine what a sword-and-sorcery mage-artist could accomplish.

Building aliens – Evolution

Whether life is made from DNA, some sort of odd molecule, or binary data, it will be subject to evolution. That’s inherent in the definition of life. Everything living reproduces, and reproduction is the reason why evolution takes place. Knowing the how and the why of evolution can help you delve deeper into the creation of alien life.

How it happens

For life as we know it, evolution is the result of, basically, copying errors. DNA doesn’t replicate perfectly; there are always some bits that get flipped, or segments that are omitted or repeated. In that, our cells are a bit like an old record or CD player, skipping at the slightest bump. Sometimes, it knocks playback ahead, and you don’t get to hear a few seconds of your favorite song. Other times, it goes back, replaying the same snippet again. It’s the same for a strand of DNA.

Mutations, as these genetic alterations are called, happen for a variety of reasons. Maybe there was a glitch in the chemical reaction that produces the DNA replication. Perhaps a stray bit of radiation hit a base molecule at just the right time. (Digital organisms would not be immune to that one. Programs can crash due to bad memory, but also from cosmic rays—interstellar radiation—hitting the components. And as our processors and memory chips get ever smaller, the risk only increases.) Anything that can interrupt the reproduction process can be at fault, and there’s almost no way to predict what will happen on the base level.

Most of the time, these errors are harmless. A single base being swapped usually doesn’t do much by itself, although there are cases where they do. Our genetic code has builtin redundancy and error correction mechanisms to prevent this “drift” from causing too much harm. Single-celled organisms have a little more trouble, as they don’t have billions of copies of their genes lying around. They tend to bear the brunt of evolution, but it can be in their best interest, as anyone who knows about MRSA can attest.

A few larger errors (or a compounding of many smaller ones) can cause a greater change in an organism. That’s where natural selection comes in. Species adapt to their environments. All else being equal, those that are better adapted tend to reproduce more, thus ensuring their genes have a higher likelihood of passing on to further generations. Thus, evolution acts as a sort of feedback loop: beneficial mutations ensure their own survival, while harmful ones are stopped before they can get a foothold. Neutral mutations, however, can linger on, as they have little outward effect; its these that can give a species its variety, such as human hair and eye color.

How you can use it

Assuming current theories are anywhere close to correct, all life on Earth derives from some microbial organism that lived three or four billion years ago. Through evolution, everything from dogs to sharks to apple trees to, well, us came to be. There are a few open questions (What was that primordial organism? Is there a “shadow” biosphere? Etc.), but that’s the gist of it. And that tells us something important about alien life. If it exists, it’s probably going to work the same way. The Grays of Planet X, for example, would be related to everything native to their homeworld, but not to the aquatic beings of Planet Y. (Unless you count panspermia, but that’s another story.)

That does not mean that all life on a planet will look the same. How could it? A quick glance out your window should show you anywhere from ten to a thousand species, none of which are visibly alike, and that’s not counting the untold millions that we can’t see. Gut bacteria are necessary for life, and their also our ten-billionth cousins. Nobody would mistake a dog for a dogwood, but they both ultimately come from the same stock. So try to avoid the tired trope of “everything on this planet looks that same”.

On the other hand, the vagaries of evolution also mean that life on one planet probably won’t look like life on another. Sure, there may be broad similarities (physiology will be the subject of the next part of this series), but it’s highly unlikely that an alien world will have, say, lions or bears. (However, this doesn’t necessarily apply at microscopic scales, as there are fewer permutations.)

Classification

For worldbuilding, you’ll likely be most interested in the species level. That’s how we define humans, as well as many of the “higher” animals. We’re Homo sapiens, our faithful pets are Canis familiaris or Felis catus, and that nasty bug we picked up is Escherichia coli.

But closely related species share a genus, and this might be something to keep in mind, especially if you’re creating a…less-realistic race. Unfortunately for us, genus Homo doesn’t have any other (surviving) members; the Neanderthals, Homo erectus, and the “hobbits” of Flores Island were all wiped out millennia ago. But that doesn’t mean your world can’t have multiple intelligent species that are closely related. They can even interbreed.

Higher levels of classification (family, order, etc.) are less useful to the builder of worlds. The traits that members of these share are more broad, like mammals’ method of live birth or the social patterns of the hominids. Really, everything above the genus is an implementation detail, as far as we’re concerned.

Adaptation

Now, back to natural selection. Species, as I’ve already said, adapt to their environments over time. We can see that in animals, plants, and any other organism you care to name. Fur changes color to provide camouflage, beaks alter their shape to better fit in nooks and crannies. Blood cells change to protect against malaria—but that leaves them more susceptible to sickle-cell anemia.

If an organism’s environment shifts, then that can render the adaptations useless. The most dramatic instances of this are impact events such as the one that killed the dinosaurs, but ice ages, “super” El Niños, and other climate change can destroy those species that find themselves no longer suited to their surroundings. And species are interconnected, so the loss of population in one can trigger the same in another that depends on it, and so on.

Apex

Much of this is background material for most aliens. The ones that are most interesting to the public at large are those that are intelligent, civilized. Like us, in other words.

We are not immune to natural selection. Far from it. But we have managed to short-circuit it to a degree. People with debilitating disorders can live long lives, potentially even reproducing and thus furthering their genetic lines. Adding to this is artificial selection, as we have performed on hundreds of plant and animal species. That’s how domestication works, as much for a wolf as for a grapevine. We take those individuals with the most desirable qualities and work things out so those are the ones that get to reproduce. It works, as attested by the vast array of dog breeds.

So aliens like us—in the sense of having civilization and technology—won’t be as beholden to their environment as their “lesser” relations. They won’t be bound to a specific climate, and they’ll be largely immune to the small shifts. Does that mean evolution stops?

Nope. We’re still evolving. It’s just that the effects haven’t really shown themselves that much. We’re taller than our ancestors, for example, because taller men and women are generally seen as more attractive. (A personal data point: I’m 6 feet tall, a full 12 inches taller than my mother, and my father was 5’8″. Not that that seems to make me any more attractive.) We live longer, but that’s more a function of medicine, hygiene, and diet, not so much genetics. Parts of us that have evolved relatively recently include Caucasian skin and adult lactose tolerance.

If our species continues to thrive, it will continue to evolve. One sci-fi favorite is space colonization, and that’s a case where evolution will make a difference. It won’t take too many generations before denizens of Mars have adapted to lower gravity, for instance. People living on rotating stations might learn to cope with the Coriolis forces they would constantly feel. It’s possible that there may come a time when there are living humans that cannot survive on their original homeworld.

And the same may be true for aliens. As an example, take Mass Effect‘s quarians. In the third installment of the series, they can (if you play things right) return to their homeworld of Rannoch. But centuries of living as space nomads spoil the homecoming, as they find themselves poorly adapted to their species’ original environment. A race of many worlds will discover the same truth: evolution is unceasing.

Magic and tech: construction

Building things isn’t necessarily a sign of civilization and higher thought—birds build nests, for instance, while ants and bees have some seriously elaborate dwellings—but we’ve definitely taken it to another level. Our planet’s surface is covered by billions of buildings, from straw huts to skyscrapers, and many are constructed on the remains of earlier settlements. And that’s only the housing. Add in all those other things we build every single day, from phones to cars, and it’s clear: humans are builders. We always have been.

Beneath the steel rebar and plastic and composite and the other myriad materials, the art of construction hasn’t changed too much over the ages. We’ve developed machinery to automate nearly every aspect of it, but it still boils down to putting pieces together. In general, the addition of magic won’t change that. As we’ll see, it can function as a sort of replacement for the advanced tools available to us but beyond the imagination of our ancestors.

Because this is such a huge topic (even covering only a small corner of it, as we’ll do here), I’m going to break this up into a few smaller sections, each focusing on one aspect of construction and how magic affects it. We’ll start with the first step in building anything: gathering the materials.

Materials

Look around you, and you’ll likely see lots of modern inventions. Computers, phones, televisions—in other words, tech. But take a closer look. Think about the building you’re in, its walls and doors. Things like that. It all had to be built from something, right?

Nowadays, we’ve got a huge variety of materials, especially synthetic ones. Plastic, in the colloquial sense of the word, is a comparatively recent invention, dating back to the 1800s. Aluminum, though found all around us, only started to be used as a component of construction around the same time. Silicone is 20th-century stuff, as are the silicon-based transistors in your computer’s CPU.

In older days, your choice of materials was far more limited. You’ve got metals and alloys, but only those accessible to earlier technology, such as iron, copper, tin, and lead. Wood, clay, and stone are natural and abundant, and they come in lots of styles, each with its own pros and cons. Plants provide fibers, best known for their role as cloth, while animals offer hide, bone, horn, and ivory. Added to these are a small assortment of classical “synthetics”, such as concrete (known to the Romans, among others), glass (at least five thousand years old, not counting natural obsidian), and rubber (derived from plants native to Central and South America).

What can magic add to that? The same thing that technological advances did. We can’t quite get to nylon or graphene, but we can make some advancements. The easiest way to do that is by adding fire: some of the better materials require higher temperatures than early medieval forges can achieve. That’s what it takes to melt tougher metals, for example. (Colder conditions aren’t nearly as helpful, however.)

Most synthetic materials, on the other hand, are created by some sort of chemical process. For that, you need the chemical (or even alchemical) knowledge that comes naturally from the growth of science. Since we’ve already established that the study of magic in our fictional world will increase experimentation and theory, it’s not a great leap to push that same outlook into metallurgy and the study of materials.

Steel, to take one notable example, was notoriously difficult for our predecessors, but magical tech could allow it to be common enough that any old adventurer could wield it. Better control over heat sources and impurities are the reason why, and they give us a number of other advances. Cheaper glass—especially clear plate glass—and ceramics are another good illustration. And if you posit a magical source of electricity (and the understanding of it), then electrolysis nets you aluminum and a number of other niceties.

For our magical society, we won’t go quite that far. They’ve got a good handle on steel, though, to the point where it’s not necessarily the mark of a rich man to have a lot of it. Similarly, quality iron is cheap, and good glass is available. And that’s in addition to the natural set above. (We’ll follow the typical fantasy tropes and say that concrete belongs to an earlier age, its secrets forgotten.) Chemistry is a growing art, but its byproducts aren’t available on an industrial scale…yet. So not too much changes, or so it seems.

Tools

The tools of the carpenter’s trade have changed dramatically in the two thousand or so years since history’s most famous practitioner of the craft. My stepdad builds houses for a living, and while he does have a set of manual hammers, saws, and the like, he won’t be using them on the job under normal circumstances. Today, it’s all about nail guns, automatic drills, compressors, generators, and an assortment of saws and sanders and similar implements.

Tools for working with materials reflect the work done, whether in modern, automated form or as the old-fashioned hand tools of yore. Saws are meant to cut, but not in the same way as, say, a knife; teeth work better than a smooth blade for breaking the thick fibrous bonds of wood in a back-and-forth motion. But splitting logs is best done with a wedge, and axes make excellent wedges. Hammering is all about applying force, and a heavy weight does wonders there. And so on.

For most of history, all these things were hand-operated. Most of the time, anyway. There have always been attempts at power tools. Hydraulic (from water) and pneumatic (from air) pressure have always been favorites; compressed air still works well today, assuming my stepdad’s compressor is in the mood to cooperate, which is never a guarantee. Only in recent times have we been able to convert electricity into the motive force necessary for tools, though heavy machinery has been able to use steam for a couple hundred years.

And that may be one of the best parallels for magical tools. We’ve already seen the application of magical force for such uses as transportation, so it’s no stretch to see how it could be incorporated into mundane tools. Our fictional realm can create magic-powered jackhammers, drills, and nail guns, all of which work far better than their hand-operated cousins, if not as well as modern gadgets. Saws? No problem. Cranes? Sure. How about a nice belt sander? We can do that, too.

But wait, as they say, there’s more. Tools aren’t just about force. What about a blowtorch that uses magical fire? That’s also possible, and probably safer than a tank of acetylene, if properly designed. Soldering and welding both benefit from that, as well, making everything from piping to stained glass cheaper and more widespread. And that’s not even counting what a full-fledged mage could do on the job.

Labor

Old tools were mostly human-powered, and that obviously means you’ve got to have humans to power them. Construction, especially from the house level on up, requires a lot of labor. Traditionally, that meant companies of hired laborers (or, in less-friendly areas, slaves) working tirelessly on the project du jour. With most tasks being done by hand, there wasn’t much choice.

Magic brings something like automation, and we know how automation affects the labor market. You only have to turn on the news to find out. (I’m writing this a couple of days after the “Brexit” vote, and from a state in the US that is seeing a resurgence in manufacturing…but one that doesn’t benefit unskilled labor. That’s all robots, or it will be soon.) As the use of self-powered tools grows, the need for massive numbers of low-wage laborers declines. The Industrial Revolution would have killed slavery without the abolitionist movement, just as the Robotics Revolution is killing the blue-collar job market today. (How that changes the economy is worthy of its own series of posts.)

So our magical society will be slave-free, both out of a concern for our fellow man and a lack of need for slaves as laborers. That doesn’t mean there won’t be any builders, however. Somebody has to work those tools, and somebody has to make them. But it’ll be a bit more like the year 2000 than 1000. Machines won’t be too widespread, but powered tools will be common enough that most have seen them in action, if not used them.

Under construction

I could go on forever, and with a much more informed opinion than usual, thanks to my family situation. But I won’t, because I think you get the picture. Our magical realm will be building in a way that should be fairly recognizable: small to medium teams of workers with semi-automatic tools. With magic, they are more efficient than their real-life counterparts, so the work gets done sooner. That implies more building, whether upward or outward, and the better materials will certainly help the former. Towers, pyramids, and other magnificent works were accomplished without magic, but this realm might be more prone to creating such masterpieces. They’ll have the means, and the time will come when there’s nothing better to do.

Building aliens – Biochemistry

What is life? At the most basic level, we’re not entirely sure. We’ve got a lot of good theories that accurately explain most of life’s inner workings, but there are quite a few loose ends. We don’t, for example, truly know how life began, nor do we know if it exists on other worlds. (Not that we don’t have a few candidates elsewhere in our solar system: Mars, Europa, Enceladus, Titan…)

All life on Earth works in about the same way, however, and we’re pretty sure we know how. It’s all based on the same fundamental building blocks, the same chemical and biological processes—processes that are not the only way to do things. When you get right down to it, we have more in common with the smallest bacteria than we probably would with any extraterrestrial, unless you invoke some sort of higher principle. As of yet, that’s uncalled for, considering we have a total biosphere sample of 1, but who knows?

The way it is

Earthly life is based on carbon. There’s no question about that. In fact, carbon is so important to life that it’s a requirement for a chemical compound to be called organic. (Think about that the next time you see “organic salt” for sale. Table salt is mostly sodium chloride, NaCl. No carbon there.)

Carbon is a great element for life, as countless astrobiologists and writers of science fiction have discovered over the years. It’s very stable, and it’s good for forming long “chain” molecules, or polymers. It readily bonds with lots of other molecules, and the compounds made from that are…interesting, to say the least. Things like carbon dioxide, sodium bicarbonate (baking soda), hydrogen cyanide, and, of course, ethanol.

But life is more than carbon. We also need a solvent, and nothing works better than plain old water. It’s perfect as a medium for the biochemical reactions necessary for life. Water has a relatively large liquid region (0°C to 100°C, or 32°F to 212°F), and it’s a fairly simple compound (H2O). It’s essentially neutral, so it doesn’t affect the reactions as much as other liquids might. Oh, and it covers about 70% of our planet’s surface, so there’s that.

Other elements find their way into Earth life besides carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. Nitrogen is a big one; percentage-wise, there’s more of it in the air than there is water on the surface, so life would be silly not to do something with it. Phosphorus, despite its volatile nature, is relatively stable once it’s bonded to a bunch of other atoms, and it’s the backbone of adenosine triphosphate (ATP), one of the most important complex molecules at the cellular level. Calcium is needed for our bones. Iron is what makes our red blood cells, well, red. Sulfur, potassium, sodium, magnesium, and a dozen or so other elements are all vital for us and most other life as we know it.

On Earth, as we know, life is made from DNA. We all know the double helix that is its form, and some might recall the scene in Jurassic Park explaining DNA and the genes made from it. From another point of view, DNA is like a computer program: a series of “instructions” that make a blueprint for life. But from a biochemical standpoint, it’s nothing more than four moderately complex molecules organized on a pair of polymer chains. These four nucleic acids bond in pairs across the chains; strictly speaking, only one chain is necessary, as in the similar (but single-stranded) RNA.

One of DNA’s functions is to encode which higher molecules are needed where. These large polymers are proteins, and they’re made up of smaller parts called amino acids. In the genetic code (on our planet, at least), three nucleic acids in the DNA chain represent an “instruction” for an amino acid. We use about twenty of those. So do dogs. And trees, mushrooms, and any other “complex” life you can think of. Bacteria use a slightly different set, but even their genetic code is built around the same twenty.

To a chemist, that’s life: a bunch of molecules acting and reacting, bonding with each other, splitting apart. What makes it unique is the fact that it can do this in such a way that it perpetuates itself. Life, once it gains a foothold, will reproduce as long as it can. That’s why the “life on Mars” debate is so polarizing: if life did exist on Mars for any serious length of time, then it would have spread all over, and some evidence should be relatively easy to find even after a billion years.

True, there’s a difference between any old kind of life and the sentient, sapient species we expect when we think of aliens. But life like that didn’t spring fully-formed. By all that we know, it had to come from somewhere, and it likely came from the same place that every other living thing on its planet did. (One hypothesis, however, argues for a shadow biosphere, a whole set of lifeforms unrelated to anything we know, yet still living all around us.)

The ways it could be

The four basic elements of organic life—carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and hydrogen—are everywhere. They’re common here, and they would be in just about any hospitable world you could imagine. Life would almost be expected to use them. Carbon, because of its polymerization qualities, is the best backbone of the four. Hydrogen and oxygen make good compounds, notably water, but also—when bonded to carbon chains—sugars and carbohydrates. Those may sound like dirty words to a health nut, but we can’t live without them (in moderation). Nitrogen isn’t of much use on its own, but throw it into molecular compounds, and it’s suddenly great.

For “life as we know it”, those four are the big ones. It’s the trace elements that will be in different concentrations. Phosphorus and calcium are important for us because of their chemical properties; it’s not entirely unreasonable to imagine alien life using them for the same purposes. The rest, though, are fair game. It’s possible that alien organisms could find ways to use elements and compounds that are toxic for us, such as heavy metals (lead, mercury, etc.).

All life on Earth is based on DNA (or its precursor, RNA), but that’s not a given. Rather, the form isn’t a given. Complex life does need some way of replicating, something resilient, resistant to random mutations, yet easily formed from common materials. Chemists have created a chain of peptides that can hold nucleic acids. And those nucleic acids don’t have to be our familiar four. Xanthine, for instance, is chemically related to adenine and guanine, and it’s found throughout the body.

Even if you have DNA, even if it functions the same way as ours, that still doesn’t mean you’re Earthly life. A simple bit of multiplication shows that there are 64 possible ways to code amino acids. But we barely use a third of that space. Most amino acids have multiple, redundant encodings, probably for added security against mutations. Mix up some of those encodings or add different options for amino acids, and you’ve got a whole new way of life.

Another option to look into is chirality. Amino acids are peculiar molecules; they can appear in one of two forms that are identical in composition, but slightly altered in shape. Chemically speaking, they’re called isomers, and life on Earth overwhelming prefers a specific shape for them. But “opposite” amino acids could be the basis for life on a different planet. That life might be otherwise terrestrial, but utterly incompatible with our proteins, enzymes, and so on. (Mass Effect used this idea in a couple of places.)

More alien

As much as any kind of life can be considered common, most alien aficionados expect ours to be so. Carbon, water, and DNA/RNA work. We’re living proof of that. Anything that uses those will be “like us”, at least at the most basic level. But can we change even that?

The problem with designing an alternate biochemistry is that it’s entirely hypothetical, and it will remain so for the foreseeable future. That hasn’t stopped some from trying, and they’ve come up with a few ideas that are scientifically possible, if not necessarily plausible.

Silicon is the favorite of sci-fi, and it also has its proponents in “serious” scientific work. Looking at the periodic table and the very ground beneath your feet, you’d think it was ideal. It’s a heavier analog of carbon, able to form polymer chains by bonding with itself, with hydrogen and oxygen and a few other molecules attached to the sides. But its added mass renders it less common, less stable, and less…free. Silicon doesn’t have the same breadth of possibilities as carbon, and many of its more interesting compounds aren’t suitable as the basis for life. Still, it does have some potential, though it would take an entirely new subfield of chemistry to explore that potential.

Sulfur, as a core element, is another possibility. It can form long chains like carbon, and it’s a bit more common than silicon. But its downfall is again in the “organic” chemistry. Those long chains are all linear. They don’t branch, and branching carbon chains are responsible for the vast array of organic molecules we know today. That doesn’t mean sulfur-based life is impossible, but it doesn’t look like it could become complex. On the other hand, sulfur can be—and is—used instead of oxygen in some lifeforms. (Bacteria that do this on Earth are used to create hydrogen sulfide, H2S, the sulfuric analog of water.)

Metallic life could use any of the more common metals as a basis. We haven’t explored much of this sort of chemistry, but titanium and a few other metals are potential candidates, particularly in high-temperature, high-pressure environments. Apart from the practicalities of using a heavier, rarer element, the lack of knowledge on this subject is what keeps us from positing “metallo-organic” life.

Arsenic is mostly poisonous for Earthly life. The very reason why it’s toxic is the same reason why it could be a potential alternative for life: it’s in the same atomic class as phosphorus. It reacts with many of the same molecules as phosphorus, “competing” with it. That’s what makes it harmful to us, but other life could use it in something like DNA. That was actually the working hypothesis for a strain of bacteria found a few years ago in California. (That claim has since been discredited.)

For solvents, authors both serious and fictional have devised a host of possibilities beyond “just add water”. Ammonia could work, but only at much lower temperatures (or higher pressures) than on Earth. And ammonia is flammable, so oxygen-breathing organisms would find it problematic, to say the least.

Another option, one that has a few scientists awfully excited, is methane. It’s a very simple hydrocarbon (CH4), it’s fairly abundant in the universe, and—under the right conditions—it’s pound-for-pound as effective as water. Methane also has the bonus of being related to bigger hydrocarbons like ethane, some of which could also be used by life. Imagining a “sea” of liquid hydrocarbons isn’t even that hard. We’ve got three of them in our solar system: Titan’s Kraken, Ligeia, and Punga. And there are indications from that moon of something that could be life-related.

The list of also-rans is long, and getting longer all the time. In addition to ammonia and methane, people have imagined life using as solvents everything from hydrogen sulfide to peroxide to silicon dioxide, AKA glass. All of them have their drawbacks, usually coming from the range of temperatures where they are liquid. But don’t let that stop you from trying.

Finally, there are a few ideas that are even more “out there”. Clouds of Venus? Sure. Charged dust inside a plasma sitting in space? Yeah, that could work. Life on a neutron star? A bit harder, but we can work something out. None of those would resemble life as we know it, though. Indeed, we might not even recognize them as living, although they would fit every definition.

Next time

So…life is complex, you see. This was only a basic overview of one aspect of it, and it’s one of the longest posts I’ve written. And truth be told, most writers won’t need any of it. Unless you want to be wild and weird, you’ll probably stick with something Earth-like: carbon, water, DNA, etc. And that’s okay. You can still make great aliens while staying inside those borders. Such life is far easier to see as alive, too, although it will almost certainly resemble nothing on our planet. (And forget about eating it. The proteins and enzymes and such will probably be completely different.)

In the next part, we’ll switch from biochemistry to actual biology, as we look at evolution and how it makes possible the variety of life in a biosphere. Aliens, like us, will evolve. They may not have genes like we do, they may not reproduce in the same way, but they’ll evolve. Next month, we’ll see how and why.

Revolution

On this day, it’s hard for an American to not think about revolution and rebellion. But what does it mean to revolt? And how can we incorporate that into worldbuilding?

In real life, revolutions are bloody business. Here, we’re familiar with the American Civil War. Essentially, the southern portion of the US declared itself an independent, sovereign state. The rest took exception to that, and the next four years were spent fighting it out. Less than a century before that, British colonists did the same thing, but with one key difference: they won.

Some rebellions are successful, like the American one or Russia’s October Revolution of November 1917 (don’t ask about the dates). Others, such as the Confederacy (1861-65) and the Boxer Rebellion of China (1899-1901), were crushed. In modern times, further examples are the Arab Spring uprisings of five years ago, the Sudanese Civil War that created the nation of South Sudan (now undergoing its own rebellion), or the seemingly interminable conflict in Syria.

All these have one thing in common: they were or are violent affairs. When Scotland attempted to secede from the United Kingdom, it was seeking to become recognized peacefully, and such a feat is nearly unheard of. Nationalism is a strong force, and those who have power rarely want to give it up; those factors combine to ensure that independence will almost always come from the barrel of a gun, not a signature and a stamp.

Building the revolution

For authors, that’s a good thing. Horrible though it may be to live through a revolution, writing about it from afar is safe enough. The setting is ripe with conflict, from the military to the dramatic. And since these times of upheaval are all but guaranteed to be laced with violence, they fit any of the bloodier genres, too.

What makes a good revolution, though? First, there needs to be a reason for it to exist. Why do certain people think they’d be better off without their mother country? The colonists in America complained about unfair taxation and, well, colonialism. So did India, for that matter. The Bolsheviks had a particular political ideology they wanted to enforce on their country. ISIS seems to want general discord and chaos. The reasons are varied, and the exact nature of the revolutionaries’ aims will determine much about the setting.

After you know why these guys are fighting, you can look at how. Pitched battles are nice if you can afford the manpower, the weapons, and the skilled officers, and if the time period fits. Nowadays, the mother country would just drop bombs on the front lines. But your options don’t have to go straight to armed conflict. Some revolutions might start that way, but many begin as political movements that later snowball into an unstoppable—or entirely stoppable, for those that failed—forces of change. Early on, a small, close-knit group can wage a war of words, spreading propaganda and information, whispering against the establishment, and so on.

Once the true fighting starts, then you’ve moved beyond a simple revolution and into a civil war. A civil war is, at its heart, a war, and we know how to write those. But its nature will add new dimensions. It’s not a case of fighting a bunch of strangers from a faraway land. Now you’re fighting your neighbors, your former countrymen. Nor will it be a symmetrical conflict. The rebels will most likely be outnumbered, outgunned, and outmaneuvered. They’ll have, at best, the support of the people and whatever materiel they were able to smuggle, steal, or bring from home. They are what we might call an underdog.

That leads us to a third question, one that only the author can answer for certain. Are the rebels right? It’s not necessarily a case of good versus evil. The mother country may very well have a legitimate government, rather than being a tyrannical empire. The rebels could openly advocate terrorism. And there can be factions on both sides. Black and white worked for Star Wars, but some works need to take things more seriously, and that means shades of gray.

A simple illustration of our own time should make all of this more clear. Take Syria, as it has been for the entirety of this decade. Bashar al-Assad is the country’s head of state. By all accounts, he’s a nasty sort, with the dictatorial bent so common in the Middle East, but he has the legitimate claim to rule. The wave of rebellions sparked by Arab Spring came to Syria, and the populace rose up against him, just like they did in Tunisia, Egypt, Algiers, and elsewhere. Assad fought back, and the two sides have been locked in civil war ever since.

But here’s the rub. The rebels of Syria were not one cohesive unit. They were made up of a number of smaller groups, each with its own grievances and goals. But in 2011, most people would be rooting for their side, because they were perceived as fighting the good fight. All would have been well, except that one of those rebel factions was ISIS. A work as simplistic as Star Wars could never hope to convey the machinations of a revolutionary force containing a subgroup objectively worse than the Evil Empire, not while trying to maintain the “David and Goliath” narrative.

Revolutions, to put it plainly, are complex. They’re tricky business. Writing one is hard work, a juggling act that many might want to avoid. For those who try, I wish you all the luck in the world. Whether you go the easy “rebels fighting the empire” route or all the way to Game of Thrones-level political scheming, you know it’s gonna be alright.