I’ve done a couple of blogs on this
already, but the other day some of my readers commented that the new species
I’d invented, called the Shrell, were
pretty convincing. That of course got me thinking – what was working this time?
Like a normal character in fiction, one of
the best ways to introduce a new alien species is to have others talking about
them first, before they actually ‘appear’ in the novel. The following excerpt
is from Chapter 5 of Eden’s Revenge, the third book in the Eden Paradox series:
“The Shrell are
already en route, they will poison space around Esperia. You must stop them.” The avatar’s eyes flared. “You must hold Esperia till
the very end, whatever the cost. Qorall will come to you.”
Kilaney
stared at the space where the avatar had been a second ago. While he chewed it
over, he set the navigation controls, and then powered up the engines for the
first jump. A low bass rumble vibrated the soles of his feet.
He
looked at his Ngank companion. “Tell me, who are the Shrell?”
The
squid did the head pirouette thing again. “Space-dwellers, born in outer edge
of gas giants.” Its tentacles coiled, pulled at each other. “This bad news.
Shrell are space-fixers. Patch space after too many high energy transits bruise
subspace. Care about their habitat.”
For
some reason Kilaney imagined dolphins, swimming through space. But he’d seen
how wars could twist allegiances, particularly on sides that tried to stay
‘neutral’. When a war went global, or in this case galactic, there was no
neutral party, everyone took sides sooner or later, out of choice or coercion.
The
engines reached mid-pitch. “What did he mean, ‘poison space’?”
“Fracture
subspace harmonics. Stops transits, creates eddies and vortices.”
Kilaney pictured ships heading full speed
then slamming into a lattice of supercharged exotic particles, like a giant
cheese-grater, shredding vessels and occupants, leaving their fragments to
drift forever in quickspace. Qorall would send in the worms later to mop
everything up. Bad news indeed.
The Shrell are mentioned once in one line
in chapter 8, but they don’t appear until Chapter 12. This time there is no
introduction, you simply get to know them. Here’s how Chapter 12 starts:
The Shrell leader Genaspa, at the front of
six phalanxes of her most trusted warriors, stared ahead with all six eyes
through the eddies of Transpace to the Quintara sector, where the spider world
lay. She already knew all the details, but wasn’t going to miss an opportunity
to train her protégé, Nasjana.
She
thought-directed “Tell. What you see. What you propose.”
Nasjana
shifted up a gear, flapping her long wings faster, and moved forward from her
phalanx of fifty, her Second taking her place. She drew alongside and slightly
behind Genaspa. “I see the one-mooned Katha-class planet whose natives call
Ourshiwann and the new ones call Esperia. I see two other planets, one further
in to its Giver and so too hot to sustain life, the other further out and too
cold, a thin asteroid belt from a former planet, and the ice-scratch of a past
comet with a return cycle of two thousand years. I propose standard treatment:
three opposing pairs at right angles to the Giver, twenty light minutes apart
before we commence the cross-run.”
Genaspa
sent a sinusoidal frisson down her right wing, a sign of approval.
So, they have wings and six eyes, and they
manoeuvre through space. Otherwise they are not described – how big they are,
their exact shape, colour; I leave all these things to the reader’s
imagination. I use ‘dialogue tags’ but let the reader know that maybe they
don’t actually ‘speak’ as we do (Genaspa ‘thought-directed’ to Nasjana). The
way they speak is different, but this is clearly a hierarchical society or a military or religious order, and the
way they talk about the ‘Giver’ is an honorific, they are environmentalists, as
was stated in the earlier passage. Then I go deeper, into their value
structure:
Nasjana did not return to her team.
“You
have a question?”
Nasjana
dropped slightly behind. “I have a doubt.”
Genaspa’s
wings took on a more rigid motion. She’d been expecting this from at least one
of her team leaders, though not Nasjana, her Second. Or maybe, she reflected,
that was why she had chosen her as Second.
“Tell.”
“Where you lead
I follow. What you tell, I do, as do we all. But this… We only poison space when absolutely necessary, to avoid rift
expansion.”
Nasjana’s
thought stream had come out fast, urgent, and Genaspa realised Nasjana was
worried. But they were short on time. They must be ready, in formation, in
every sense of that word.
“Tell true,
Second.” She had to wait a full flap-beat for the response.
“Why do we
follow the orders of Qorall? He has brought … the Xenshra inside the galaxy,
those despicable worms. I fear we will never get them out. And Qorall has
caused more space damage than in recorded Grid history.”
It was a good
question, but not the whole reason Nasjana must be daring to doubt her First’s
judgement.
“Tell deeper.
All.”
Nasjana wings
trembled, slowing her slightly until with an effort she caught up. “My
husbands. I fear many will perish today.”
Genaspa forced
herself to concentrate on the flight, to keep it steady. A First must always be
sure, never waver. Tell true, she had instructed, and yet she had not told her
team leaders the whole. None of the husbands would survive the day. She and
three hundred Shrell would enter the system, she and fifty would return, all
female. This was a high price. But only Genaspa knew that Qorall held fifty
thousand Shrell – a tenth of their entire population – hostage in a far away
quadrant, lured there to try and shore up the damage done when he and his worms
breached the galactic barrier eighteen years earlier...
So, the reader now gets that this is a
matriarchal society, where the females run things, but care deeply for their
husbands, and the stakes are clearly laid out – these aliens are not just there
to mix things up in the plot, they are players, their stake is important to
them, and the reader maybe begins to care about them too. To make sure, a bit
further in the section, I go further into Genaspa’s character, making it personal:
“Second, You
will signal to the other leaders, and instruct your own husbands, that what we
do today is of the utmost importance for the survival of the galaxy.”
Nasjana blinked
all six eyes at once, for a full flapbeat. “Such a message should come from the
First, not me.”
No, Genaspa
thought, not this time. I may not survive this run. They must begin to hear
from you as a Leader.
Nasjana
hesitated, then fell back.
As the thought
streams rippled through the ranks, Genaspa felt their swarm’s wing pulse
harmonic grow stronger. But she herself did waver. She thought of her own
husbands, lost during a similar run two thousand years earlier. It was why she
was First, because she had paid the price, knew that the husbands’ life force
would be bled away from them as they ripped spacetime; that was the energy
exchange needed to inflict such damage. She had cherished each of her six
males, and had not taken a husband since.
Abruptly she
made the decision. She slowed down, decelerating at a breathtaking pace, as if
rearing up against a sudden wall. With no small pride she observed and felt all
six phalanxes stay in formation, even the husbands. The entire swarm stopped
and hung, panting. The eddies of Transpace scattered around them like columns
of orange steam blown away into wispy nothingness.
She addressed
them all. “We will pay a heavy price today.” Her thought-stream flickered for a
moment, then regained its true. “You are the best. That is why you were chosen,
why you are here. But many of us will not return today.” She let here eyes
swivel to take in every individual Shrell, even the males, who bowed and
blinked all eyes in return. “And so I wish you to say your goodbyes properly,
as you see fit. You have one hour.” She turned her back on them, quietened her
form-sensors so they could have their privacy.
A single ship
threaded above her, the Mannekhi one she had overtaken earlier. She watched its
trail, its ripples flourish then diminish, eddies whirling in its wake then
dissipating. Go ahead, she thought, do whatever it is you have to do, you have
little time. She spied another ship on the other side of the Quintara sector, a
Q’Roth Marauder, also heading in at unbecoming speed towards Esperia. She
reflected that so many beings rushed around in their short life-spans,
generally making things worse. Shrell were different, they were gardeners,
conserving natural space.
Genaspa heard
the cries of ecstasy behind her. Good, she thought, in a year there will be new
Shrell to replace those we lose today. Her eyes fixed hard on the distant
planet, the object of so much sudden attention, while a dozen planets fell
every week during this war. She hoped that whatever lay on Esperia was
worth the sacrifice.
I give Genaspa compassion, and make her a
sympathetic character through her former loss, and she deserves respect because
she is willing to make hard decisions. But I try to keep the Shrell’s emotions
and values different enough that they are still alien, not ‘anthopomorphized’
characters (humans wearing some extra deep ridges on their foreheads), and
underline this when she watches with disdain as other ships tearing through
space on their business, whatever that may be.
The Shrell next appear in Chapter 17,
making their ‘run’, and the reader will be conflicted because what the Shrell do will
damage mankind’s chances of survival, but at the same time the reader will hopefully also
be sympathetic to the plight of these winged, six-eyed aliens…
In summary, here are 7 off the cuff ‘rules’
I have used with the Shrell:
- Introduce them first through other characters discussing them –
that’s how we often get to hear about interesting people
- Don’t over-describe, let the reader’s imagination have a light
work-out
- Make their dialogue different in its lexicon and rhythms
- Show how their society works (e.g. hierarchy, dominant sex,
etc.)
- Show their value structure through cultural references
(‘Giver’; ‘its true’ etc.)
- Make the reader care about the aliens, rather than them just
being there as a prop (this can include making the reader hate the aliens)
- Remind the reader that these beings are not human, they really are
alien
To be fair, I do have an image in my mind of what the Shrell look like. I'm a scuba diver, and I love rays, for example Eagle rays, who I've seen swim in formation quite recently (January in Mauritius). They are incredibly graceful, as are Mantas. From a Scifi purist point of view, some might complain that no animals could live in space, but I think we have to wait and see - we are only just learning about dark matter and Higgs-Boson, there is so much we don't know, and that is where Scifi comes in, to explore possibilities.

Eden’s Trial is available in ebook from
Amazon and in paperback September 2012
Eden’s Revenge is coming out Xmas 2012 in
ebook, paperback April 2013.
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