Okay, so among everything else I’m doing these days and the projects I’m writing, I’m trying to figure out one of my stories. In this story, I’m working out a whole alien civilization right down to creating a whole other species of people. And so, I have run into a slight conundrum.
Reproduction.
Granted, it’s not really going to come up in the strictly technical sense of which parts go where to do what. I’ve already figured out most of that anyway. It occurred to me, though, that I never decided whether or not I wanted to have androgynous aliens with no gender or to have them actually have the classic male and female genders.
Granted, they are meant to interact with humans and most of their physiology is pretty humanoid. One of those like-us-but-really-not sort of situations.
So, those who do check out this blog, tell me. Should I have genderless aliens or is it too alienating (Yes, pun, shut up) and should I put in the genders to make them a little more familiar?
Tags: alien, gender, plot, species, writing
Well I think it totally depends on what the aliens are doing in the book. I think if you have a lot of the plot worked out already yet haven’t figured this into the equation then perhaps they don’t need gender. Try and think about which gender each alien character used would be and if its obvious then I think they should have gender.
I think you should have (biologically) genderless aliens. That leaves you free to mix and match traditionally male or female traits into your characters and allows you to have love subplot. Plus if humans are meeting these aliens it give you some bases for some hopefully interesting character conflict.
I’m just worried about them becoming a little too alien considering that they’re going to be interacting pretty closely with humans as well. They’re scientists, aristocrats and all sorts of other roles, but since the audience has grown up with things like Star Wars, Star Trek and Shatner screwing aliens, I have to wonder if genderless aliens aren’t a little too unusual for the general audience. Gender or no gender, overall it doesn’t make much difference to the story itself, though. Traditional gender roles are a little absent in the setting.
Heh. Me intentionally writing a romantic subplot. Right.
Then don’t even mention whether they have gender or not? Let the audience decide?