The difficult thing about creating a fictional alien species is that if they are too familiar, they seem inauthentic. Slap some bumps on the forehead and voilà : every Star Trek alien ever. And, the Star Trek franchise eventually had to explain this phenotypical homogeneity (ask a fan, but it’s in a Next Generation episode) to keep the credibility of the milieu intact.
On the other hand, to seem scientifically authentic aliens have to be … unfamiliar? Unrelatable? What’s a better word?
Alien.
However, if you take the creative process step-by-step, you can work outward from simple premises to alien species that are both inhuman yet believable and understandable. Continue reading
Now that director J. J. Abrams has moved on from his quasi-reboot of the Star Trek franchise to quasi-reboot the Star Wars franchise, I am inspired to speculate what his handling of the former presages for the latter.
I made a bit of a promise with the 
Celebrated American author Raymond Chandler once said: “The faster I write the better my output. If I am going slow, I’m in trouble. It means I’m pushing the words instead of being pulled by them.”
“At the time 
edited by Catherine Ross Nickerson
In the intro cinematic for the popular Medieval fantasy video game, Skyrim, the player finds herself in a wagon full of prisoners being hauled to a fort for punishment. When the wagon arrives, one of the prisoners mutters that it’s “the end of the line.”
, when it occurred to me the degree of freedom writers of realistic genres enjoy over writers of fantasy, horror, and science fiction.
One of my favorite speculative fiction writers, Rahul Kanakia, shared