by C. L. Kagmi
The goal of science fiction is to expand our horizons. The genre asks not only what is, but what might be. What might life be like in a time or place we haven’t seen yet? How might alien minds be different from our own?
These investigations start, like all literature, with studying our own experiences. Then, some of us ask: What if our senses, our social structures, our emotions were different?
Neuroscience can help answer that question. By revealing the building blocks of our own perception in the concrete forms of genes, proteins, and neurons, it gives us authors new toys to play with.
Sensory Perception
Did your aliens grow up in a place with a different spectrum of light? Is their sun a different type of star, or did they evolve in the black depths of an alien sea? Maybe their eyes need different photoreceptors from our own. They’ll see different colors or perhaps substitute vision with some completely different sense.
Which sensory perceptions mean home, safety, and love to them? Which mean danger, fear, and rejection? Are they warm-blooded social creatures for whom warmth, softness, and touch are the language of intimacy? Or does their biology fear heat and embrace solitude as the surest form of safety? Do they read some form of long-distance communication as the language of love and solidarity instead?
Many of us learned in school that we have five senses: sight, smell, hearing, touch, and taste. Science has revealed that we actually perceive much more than that: temperature, balance, pain, chemical communication, proprioception, magnetoreception, and intuitions from a whole-body neural network that processes information outside of the brain. We now know that chemical communication and magnetoreception are major parts of the sensory world of some species on Earth, and that “gut feelings” in humans are not just a figure of speech. How many frontiers does that open?
Worldbuilding Questions
When crafting an alien viewpoint character, there are two major questions to ask:
- How might their physical sense organs be different from ours? If their sun is of a different star type, does it make sense for them to have evolved different photoreceptors? Will there be colors, types of electromagnetic radiation, they can see that we can’t? How might temperatures, energies, and pigments that are invisible to one species but not another become a plot point? How might it affect their daily relationships to know they literally do not see the world in the same way?
- How do they feel about these sensations? Our emotional and sensory associations with colors are shaped by Earth. The calming blues of clear skies and still water, the soothing greens of plant life in daylight, the warm yellow of the sun, the excitement and danger of red blood. How might another species whose sun, sky, blood, or plant life are different colors feel about our world? On the other hand, how might we feel about theirs?
Consider life around a Class K star. These are more common than our own sun’s type, and scientists believe they may host life. This means many aliens may grow up around them. These stars are cooler, producing more light we would think of as red and less of the light we would perceive as blue or green.
Would it make sense for their children to see into the infrared range or to lack receptors for the color blue? Would they have finer distinction in the red part of the spectrum, perceiving multiple primary colors in shades that look nearly identical to us? Would they pity us for our inability to appreciate the finer points of their art, while a Monet canvas might appear black and white to them?
How would such a species feel about the colors they do see? Do they have red iron blood, like most Earth animals, or blue copper or green blood like a few? Would they associate the color of their hemoglobin with excitement and danger, or would it be the absence of red light found in hemocyanin or biliverdin that speaks of spilled blood?
An Example
Let’s try something a little more alien. What if a sense that is minor in our experience is conscious and major for our aliens? What would a technological species that relies on chemical communication look like? This species could communicate in ways others can’t, using messages carried in air or water currents. But how do they feel about telecommunications that can’t transmit pheromones?
I play with this question in the design of my own aquatic species, discussed in my short story “Hostess.”
“The taste of Draco cannot be described,” she says, suddenly. Her eyes finally leave my face and stray to the sea. “It is—was—like any underwater ecosystem, swimming with pheromones and gametes and waste products, but much more intense. Much more varied—the flavors of a given reef much more subtle.
“Our people coded messages in carbon chains, memories and mating calls, interesting observations, art pieces designed to elicit emotion, requests for and offers of help. I’m sure you’ve read about it, how our entire ocean, our entire world, was effectively a massive brain. Our ocean thought, knew, experienced, expected. Our World-Minds speculated about life around other stars before you came, you know.”
Learn to Stretch Your Horizons
At first glance, breaking experience down into its mechanical parts, its genes and proteins and neurons, might sound clinical. But human experience arises from our proteins. When seeking to stretch our horizons beyond what we know, looking at what we do know and then breaking it can be very instructive.
We often forget how much we share with all life on Earth: common ancestors, a common genetic code, a shared environment for billions of years. We can’t be sure what alien life is like with a sample size of one world. But we can study the hardware that creates our own experiences and ask, “Would this be the same if it evolved somewhere else?”
The experiences, emotions, meanings, and relationships these mechanisms create, that is the domain of science fiction.
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C. L. Kagmi earned her B.S. in neuroscience from the University of Michigan in 2011. She worked in clinical research at Mott Children’s Hospital for five years before leaving to start her writing business. Her writings have appeared in Analog Science Fiction & Fact, Writers of the Future Vol. 33, and Compelling Science Fiction: The First Collection.