How to Make Aliens Sound Like Aliens

If you were to look over all the reviews posted at Goodreads and Amazon for the first four books of the Beta-Earth Chronicles, you’d see readers are surprised and often impressed with the original storytelling style. More than a few readers say they’ve never read anything like these books before.

I’m delighted to read such responses. After all, I went to considerable effort to create “Beta-speak,” for lack of a better term for that world’s dialect. Perhaps you’re wondering what that means and how the unusual syntax and grammar of Beta-Earth was created.

Well, here’s a very short sample illustrating what I’m talking about:

True said, I was raised not to do the things I have done. None like me expect to see the things I have seen. Deep in my womb, I still fear to share
my memories of the shakings of two earths. Deep in my womb, I would prefer to keep our private memories within our tribe. But the lies, the distortions
rage on. So our skolings begin.
For my part, in 5 of 1720, in the 24th year of my being, I had honored to complete my training at Stadsem Wostra for Independent Literates. As I was an
orphaned blue-skin with no family linkages, my Brown Shapers had determined I was marriageable. This possibled, they told me, only if I became skilled
enough to secure a position where my talents could be shown at their best advantage. Still, I stunned when I was told to report to Director-Shaprim Uneld

When I began drafting The Blind Alien, one of my first thoughts was that sci fi, almost by definition, requires strange new terminology. Authors need new nouns for people, places, things. I wondered what else I could do to make it clear my narrators were from another planet and still be understandable for readers.

The first thing I came up was crunching passive verbs into active ones. Instead of “This was possible,” try “This possibled.” This not only sounds different, it also results in a more active, tighter flow. Many little words like “was” and “had” often disappeared.

I played a similar trick with negatives. Instead of “I didn’t care,” try “I cared not.” Again, the phrasing is different sounding. More little words like “did” and “would” are often gone. This too picked up the pace, even though in subtle ways. It’s amazing how such seemingly small things ad up an add up into a distinctive rhythm and beat.

Of course, there were a number of other stylistic choices as well. For me, there were several rewards for these choices. As readers of any of the Beta books know, the stories are told by alternating voices as if you’re reading an oral history with constantly changing narrators. There’s Malcolm Renbourn from our earth. His perspective is shared in very normal American English. His passages are layered in between those of the various Betan speakers who, by the way, I tried to make distinctive from each other. For example, when Lorei and Elsbeth are introduced, I tried to give them a cadence and slightly different level of vocabulary from the previous women in the story. To signal they have a lower level of education, they usually say “I be very uncomfortable, not the proper “am.”

Another unexpected reward, I felt, was that long sections of exposition and description were more interesting when told with this novel use of language. Not only was the setting or character development hopefully engaging on their own merits, but readers would keep turning the pages because they were caught up in the original style.

Well, that’s the short version of the story and doesn’t touch on all the things I tried to do with vocabulary and an invented grammar. But this is just a little blog post which hopefully whets your interest in finding out more in the books themselves. Please let me know if there’s anything you’d like to know more about or if you want to tell me what worked for you and what didn’t.