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The Alien Problem
I'm better now.
I'm not going to edit Exchange Student (doggone it, if people don't like the new title, then I'm going back to the one I still use inside my head anyway) at the moment, though.
Instead I've finally dusted off the last round of edits to Quarter Moon, found that Nonelvis hadn't hacked it into little bits as much as I suspected she had, and I am beginning to incorporate her markup.
In three or four days - depending on workload - I should have something up that I can show to people and they can take the knives to. And the process will begin anew :)
I do not believe that Exchange Student is unsalvageable. However, I do believe that it will be a massive piece of work. In addition to rearranging the time flow of the novel (cutting the first 28,000 words and inserting the essential bits of that through reminiscence later), and adding an essentially brand-new major character throughout (previously she was only mentioned at the beginning and end of the book), I have to deal with the dreaded Alien Problem.
Since that's kind of a meta-problem, and is not just more of me grousing about this book, I shall bore you with it at some length here.
I have to make an alien world substantially more alien.
This is why I try to avoid writing SF in the first place. I hate having to envision these things. This book became SF despite my best efforts to prevent it from doing so.
My brain works best in the mode of "weird things happening to normal people" in our present locale and time period. I like making my characters react to events. (Aedie doesn't react much to events - that's the point - which is why I need another character to give the reader, and Aedie, a reality check.)
I don't like writing novels in the past because they ask for too much research, and I don't like novels in the future because they ask for too much creativity.
That probably sounds weird - a fiction writer complaining that something requires creativity? But it's not creativity I like - and it's not creativity that I feel really contributes to the story.
That's an even more controversial statement, so let me try saying it a different way.
I don't want people concentrating on how the doors or the kitchens work. I don't want to give you any more of the plumbing than necessary. If I want you focusing on Aedie, then I don't want you worrying too much about how he cooks his food. Ideally, I could just lay down the rules: This is a door-analogue, this is a stove-analogue, and you can assume there'll be analogues for everything he needs to do. When there's a crucial difference between the planets, he'll trip over it, and then you'll know about it as well.
That's what I tried to do. It didn't work.
Okay, granted, one reason it didn't work is because Aedie is a drag. He's not interested in anything, so he doesn't leave the reader much to do. The reader's eyes wander, metaphorically, and want to look at the scenery - except there's no scenery. And part of that is because the narrative is Aedie's diary, and Aedie doesn't think any of that stuff is worth writing down.
But even if this weren't an epistolary, first-person novel, and even if Aedie weren't such a little jerk, I'd still have qualms about spending any significant time at all talking about the details of alien day-to-day life.
I believe that repeated detail has a diminishing effect. That is, I don't want you to be so interested in the life cycles of the native flora and fauna that you miss the impact when the really major differences between Sethin and humans are revealed.
But - it has been pointed out - this is a cop-out on my part, because if they have those major differences, then the rules say they should have lots of minor differences as well. In essence I'm lulling my readers into believing these are just humans with all the labels changed ... and then it's not fair to spring a sudden, dramatic alien-ness on them.
One suggestion that I've gotten is that I make this a parallel Earth of some kind - making it rather more plausible that they are Mostly Human but different in a few big ways. We already have a structure of symbolism that allows for this (everybody grew up reading comic books with Earth-One and Earth-Two, right?) - it doesn't stretch credibility as much.
I don't know why this suggestion doesn't appeal to me. I think it's important to me that the aliens be aliens. For one thing, they have to think that humans are weird, and vice versa.
The other thing is that I don't see the point in making my details of the alien planet too different, because I believe the human brain looks for analogues. I think it's completely natural of Aedie to see an insect that pollinates plants and think in terms of "What Earth insect does that most resemble?" and mentally tag the insect with that label, for reference purposes.
And a system where there aren't any things we recognize as "insects" or "plants"? I can't imagine one of those. Can you? My creativity just doesn't stretch that far.
What do you think? Leave my fiction out of it, and tell me as an SF reader - which I suspect a lot of you are. What do you expect from your aliens? How alien do they need to be?
© Columbine
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