Creating the K'val

Several days ago, I reminded you that as we hit the home stretch for Tales of the Vuduri, I won't have time to truly flesh out all the Big Ideas I had for the novel The Milk Run. Instead, I am presenting some capsule summaries of the motivation behind a subset of those ideas. Today I wanted to talk about the first actual aliens that my humans of the 35th century encounter, the plant people named the K'val. Here is a picture of Sh'ev, in case you don't remember:

To me, it is obvious that there has to be other planets out there with intelligent life. On Helome and Deucado, we had life and on Deucado, we had evidence that there was intelligent life some time in the distant path. There is no argument that the Stareaters were intelligent but we still don't know if they are alive or just incredible machines. Nonetheless, it was time to invent true aliens and I didn't want to just to take some humans and slap on some plastic prosthetics and have them speak English. So I decided let's start with intelligent plants.

To start, I wanted to take you to Hades, the sixth planet out in the Nu2 Lupi system and make it hellishly cold. When the Ark IV set out for that star system, the scientists back on Earth figured that the fifth world, Planet E, later to be known as Ay'den would be the most suitable for humans. But when the colonists got there, Planet E was nowhere to be found. Luckily, and I use the word loosely, the scientists also knew that Planet F, later known as Hades, could also sustain human life, however uncomfortably.

The people living on Hades were under duress during their entire four decade stay so the last thing they needed was a bunch of rabid aliens coming in, torturing and killing them and kidnapping them. What could possibly motivate an intelligent alien race to do that to a bunch of cold and hungry people, a thousand strong?

So I wrote the long history of the K'val and then worked it backwards. They owed their very existence to the would-be god, Molokai and he commanded them to go forth and grab the humans under the threat of pain to their loved ones. In other words, they were not inherently evil, just extorted into performing acts which were actually against their nature. The history of the K'val was recounted fully in the short story collection The Vuduri Companion. Keeping in line with the idea that The Milk Run would be presented as a cosmic mystery story. So the K'val became a mini-mystery.

However, our hero, Aason Bierak, was eventually able to use the abilities he inherited from his mother to communicate with the aliens, determine why they were attacking humans and he acted to rectify the problems. In fact, the first K'val he encountered, Sh'ev B'oush, became one of his best friends. The K'val themselves became the first alien members of the human-led Galactic Union. Sh'ev even makes a guest appearance in a short story entitled The Immortals and his son, B'shev are the stars of The Vuduri Knight, if I ever write it. I like the K'val, they are good and caring creatures and fierce warriors. They are great to have a friends and should be feared as enemies. I hope I get time to explore their lives and culture more down the road.