Truly Alien
Far too often, the imagination of science fiction authors stops at the doorstep of alien life. The author’s universe may contain exotic technologies and perhaps strange physics, but too often, speculation on alien beings is hopelessly unoriginal. You might call it the Star Wars affect, where an alien is any human being with an animal head on its shoulders and maybe five-fingered hands.
In Source World Ghosts, a major emphasis was placed on conceiving of alien life that was distinctly alien. There are no humanoids in Source World Ghosts, except within the family tree of human subspecies, who all descend from the original human species. Rather, the alien life of SWG was designed with one thing in mind: evolution on planets with entirely different masses, chemistry and densities would follow entirely different paths.
Not even the usual starting point for alien life, DNA, is a given for all species of alien. Whereas the Skizan and Pladjin are DNA-based lifeforms, the molecular basis of two other lifeforms in the SWG universe is something else. With the mysterious Belemyolan, for example, the genetic basis (if they even have genes) is not assumed. Rather, it is inferred that nobody really knows, with the possible exception of the Freika shepherds that harness the space-shifting power of the Belemyolan. The other non-DNA lifeform is the Frijasunu, an Ammonera species that Yuen Ukura interacted with just before her death. Living on a world with ammonia seas and average global temperatures of -40 degrees Celsius, the biochemical reactions DNA-based life requires could not make life possible. Instead, other molecular chains were required.
All of these alien environments, even the most terrestrial-like of them, have produced wildly different biologies that are adapted specifically to the planetary conditions they came from. And these different evolutionary paths have not only resulted in stark differences in morphology, but also in consciousness. Such is the cause of considerable difficulty in communicating between aliens and humans. Even with the Skizan, the most similar lifeform to human beings, communication is approximate at best, left to broad interpretation and often entirely ambiguous. With creatures such as the Belemyolan or Frijasunu, complex understanding is completely impossible, due to the fundamentally different ways our mental systems operate. Indeed, it is often speculated that the Belemyolan do not even have a brain in the sense of the individual brain every human has. Instead, they are seen as possessing a hive brain and each individual to be as mentally complex as a plant.
For more information on the alien life of Source World Ghosts, see the Alien Section of the book’s website.
