Creating Creatures

Jim and John Gaines

              We thought you might be interested to know that we will be conducting a presentation on August First at the Virginia Writers Club annual symposium at the Piedmont Virginia Community College in Charlottersville, Virginia.  The subject will be "Creating Creatures," and it will draw on classic science fiction creatures of the past, as well as some of our own creatures from the novels Life Sentence and Spy Station.  Here are the descriptions from the symposium program and a set of questions we will be distributing for discussion.

                We will discuss approaches to creating non-human characters in science fiction and other literature.  This will involve both From-Evolution-Out and From-Environment-In techniques, with examples from our Entara & Klein Cycle of novels and other sources.  Participants will be invited to sketch out their own non-human characters based in the FEO and FEI methods.  We will also consider the possibility of non-human-model robotic creatures.

Some Essential Questions

1.       1.  Much modern sci fi assumes that extraterrestrial creatures would be humanoid and largely anthropomorphic in both body and thought.  This was not the case in the earliest sci fi and there is no reason it should be now.  After all, Earth is currently undergoing its sixth extinction period.  Humans were not around for the first five and may not be after this one.  Given the almost infinite possibilities for planetary environments and the extreme unlikelihood that any which developed intelligent life would follow the chance-filled history of Earth, shouldn’t we look at other possible evolutionary scenarios?

2.      2,   Is there any good reason why another intelligent race should have similar values, associations, patterns of thought, and social organization as humans, given the fact that these are not shared by other Earth-bases species?

3.       3.  How would other environments, other evolutions, other histories, affect extraterrestrials and the  way they communicate (or fail to) with humans?

4.     4.  What simple biological facts could influence other intelligent races differently from us?

5.     5.  What possible sources of cooperation and conflict could arise between various different life forms?

6.     6.  What are the possibilities and limitations of comparison with human behavior?

7.     7.  How could other creatures adapt to the exigencies of factors like space travel?

8.     8.  Assuming that some forms of extraterrestrial intelligence may be generally “robotic,” what might the consequences be if they were not created by humans?