One thing we tend to get in Sci-Fi and Fantasy are a lot of "bumpy-headed humans" as aliens. This is relatively easy to do, as we more or less have preconceived notions of what humans want, need, and can do. However, it's also unlikely that life forms evolved or created to cover different environmental conditions would end up with the same biological functionality. In my opinion, it's almost certain that they would become truely alien aliens, from our human perspective.
Once upon a time, in a web many years ago, a bunch of people sat down and came up with a world where alien-aliens would interact in a created world capable of supporting each species and allow them to interact. I'd like to share my creation for that setting, which (as far as I know) never went anywhere beyond its own, private website.
I started with a basic thought - I wanted something ALIEN, something radically different than human. I decided I wanted an aquatic species, as a criteria which would greatly change the basis of biology and sophonce.
So, I ended up creating the Singers. They're radially symmetric, looking something like a cored out, ribbed barrel cactus about 1 meter long, one meter in diameter. They're syphonovores - they eat the microscopic life they filter out of the water they're swimming through. They have very limited 'sight' (basically just able to detect light and shadow), but beyond human norm hearing range (as many aquatic life forms of our experience seem to.) Their senses of smell and taste (chemoreception) are exceptional.
Their limbs are tentacular, and only strong in contraction - they can't really poke or push, but they can squeeze and pull. Their main barrels (versus their limbs, which stream along in the slots between ribs when not in use) are covered in pneumatocysts - so called 'stinging cells'. The barrels expand and contract as they swim - something like squid or octopi do - but with a hard shell coating each rib, the expansion is limited to the fleshy regions between the hardened ribs. Ribs tend to be 3-5" across, and are solid from front to back of the creature. The gaps between ribs tends to be 2-4" across, flexing as much as 4-6" at max extension
The jet can have membranes drawn across it, something like voice chords in the human throat. This is multipurpose- for maximum speed, no membranes are used and they move in a straight line. To turn, membranes at the rear of the body are tightened on one side, causing the jet to deflect as it leaves the body. A second layer of membranes (also at the back) are porous, and are used as their primary food gathering mechanism. A third type of solid membranes are found at the top of the body can be used to vibrate, allowing noise generation. (As one aspect of sexual dimorphism, females of this species have multiple copies of this third layer, whereas males only have one copy of this layer - again, more on this later.)
One of the questions I struggled with was, what level of technology would these sophonts be able to develop? They can't build fires - they live under water! Similarly alchemy would be wildly different with a saltwater medium, and so not too likely to be well advanced. Yet, they're capable of a wide range of high-intensity sounds. With a little world-builder fiat, they can be expected to live in areas where large quartz crystals can be found. Quartz has an interesting property called being 'piezoelectric' - it's able to take vibration (aka, sound energy) and convert it into electrical charge. With a large enough crystal and a strong enough sound pulse, it seemed (from research I've lost, unfortunately) to be possible to generate a large electrical charge - perhaps large enough to melt adjacent metals, leading to a metal using scenario. Using clay shaping around metal powder, forging specific shapes could at least theoretically be possible.
The sexual dimorphism doesn't result in different sizes - males and females average around the same mass & dimensions. The differences are less physiologically obvious. Males have a single ring of 'speaking' membranes around the top of their barrel like bodies, females have around a dozen. More importantly, only adult females are truely sophont - males are much more restricted, intellectually.
(I had considered a different scale of mentality, where more layers of vocalization membranes would lead to higher intellect, but decided to keep things more clearly defined, at least for that purpose. To enhance the alien, I might well revisit that decision.)
Each female bonds with around 6-8 males during their semisentient initial growth period. During this time, they lack the hardened shell they achieve at maturity, and the rapid stings back and forth immunize each other from their individual venoms. This becomes more important at maturity, as will be discussed. The males take a single note as their name, and the female blends all the males' notes and a seperate tone or small number of tones to be their own name. Non-Singers typically shorten this musical expression of individuality into a simple chord, to the mild pique of the Singers.
Each Singer's voice is, to their species at least, quite unique. This allows each member of the choir (the collective name for a specific female and her bonded males) to pick the other choir members' voices out of all but the most chaotic soundscapes.
After a couple year period of soft-skinned growth, most surviving Singers reach about 75 centimeters in length and diameter. At this point they grow their first hardened ribs. It is at this time that females also rapidly develop their sentience.
Singers grow periodically, having a month long 'soft season' about every 2 years (one seasonal year on their home planet) after maturity. During this time, the hardened ribs flake off (a very irritating process to Singers) and the females temporarily loose their higher intellectual abilities. This tends to make their males (who also loose their hardened ribs at the same time) rather hyperprotective of their females, jostling (and stinging) each other and keeping between their female and any perceived external threat, which explicitly includes all Singers not of their choir.
However, to reproduce, males from other choirs need to sting the soft-skinned female. The Male Singers' pneumatocysts not only inject toxins, but also sperm-equivalents. Soft-skinned females' bodies encyst the sting sites, and over the remaining period of time in their soft season bud off immature Singers from those points. This steals the growth period of the female. A choir which has reproduced over several seasons thus develops a size difference between the males and their female.
Due to their greatly increased vulnerability during the soft season, most Singer polities have organized around multiple choirs with alternating soft seasons. Each subset of choirs going through their soft season are the primary concern of the remaining 'clan' structure. This tends to make long-term relationships with non Singer sophonts difficult - the Singers they're used to working with periodically disappear and are unavailable for approximately a month at a time.
Thoughts? Comments? Life?
CC BY-NC-NA https://creativecommons.org/ @someoneusual
Personally, I doubt that any industrial civilization would have aliens too different from humans. Ultimately tool use breeds civilizations instead of intelligence. Falling from the sky even the most intelligent creature could only calculate how hard they will hit the ground. Same with intelligent aquatic creatures, their use of tools, their metallurgy, their material sciences - all very much diminished. Written word alone would be a giant problem under watter.
I agree tool use affects civilization, but the whole post is one radically different approach to metal using sophonts. :) I do not think the Singers' civilization(s) would be very human-like, driven by the wild biological differences more than the tool using similarities.
Agreed, written word would be difficult, but given clay and stone exist under water, I don't doubt there'd be equivalents of cunieform or Hittite available. Wood, cloth, paper and ink are likely not feasible underwater, but there are other options. Printing presses are likely a VERY advanced technology for those reasons, again causing cultural differences.
Thanks for commenting!
I'm reminded partly of Nnedi Okorafor's aliens in her Binti series, along with a short story in Compelling Science Fiction of an aquatic race. Both aliens were sufficiently advanced technologically (Nnedi's being space-faring), using tools and having complex societies. I would rather enjoy reading a story about your sophont civilisations.
I've started the Binti series but haven't gotten very far in it as of yet. Too many good books, never enough time...
I'll have to see what I can pull together one of these days - the legend of C7maj and her males, perhaps, or the Shoaling Sea's rumored great doom. We shall see!
I really like this concept. It's very unique compared to other things I've encountered, and I like that you've thought out what technology level they'd have and found a creative reason for it. One thing I'd be interested in is whether the Singers have any beliefs about the natural rhythms of the ocean - do you think that tides, currents, et cetera produce vibrations that have philosophical or religious connotations for them? Are the piezoelectric crystals you mentioned considered sacred, or just tools?
Thanks! I hope people start working on their own unique takes - there's tons of room to grow beyond bumpy-headed humans. (I've nothing against BHH's, they can be quite fun, but I would love to have ever-broader options.)
I hadn't grown the concept in those areas. I had notions of clusters of families of choirs as the base nation concept. Given the eventual size of some of their tooling, as well as limited livable space (underwater to a certain depth, avoiding 'deserts' with low microbiota counts) would tend to clump populations, so a city-state-like scenario at various early times in their development is IMO probable. Beyond those physical constraints, I've little thought on what keeps these clumps working smoothly. As their microbiota husbandry skills increase (IF they increase - I'd tend to think they would as they want big families for defense-in-depth of their vulnerable Soft Seasons) they could expand the 'sweet spots' for life to cover much more terrain, but there'll still be limits based on depth. Dredging (both from deeper waters and to make shallow water zones out of coastal lands) are possible extents but both are intensive efforts, so much like humans there'll be the whole property value coming down to 'location, location, location'.
Hadn't considered religion/philosophy. What drives a syphonovore's belief set? How did early Singers deal with population pressures? I've no answer off the top of my head, but I certainly thank you for the questions - I do like brain-stretching like this!