Rules of Sci-Fi & Fantasy: Otherworldly But Relatable Characters - podcast

One of the main goals when thinking about character development is often how you can make your characters relatable to an audience. When creating characters for sci-fi and fantasy novels, it can be difficult to create otherworldly and unusual characters that readers understand and want to engage with. Sci-fi author Vernor Vinge shares his thoughts and advice on how you can make your non-human characters relatable to your human audience, even when there are extreme differences between them.
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  • Thank you Vernor, yes I can see the points of working with certain characteristics to make the aliens appear more believable. I have a few little characters in the book I am working on and I can see now how I can give them a voice. Carole Lane (Weave)
  • You are so right. If the alien life form is too unbelievable, you lose your reader's interest in the story to their trying to understand the alien, and you have lost them, Or, they don't understand the purpose of the alien, and never become involved with the story. Again, you have lost them. So either the life form's have a purpose, or they must be related to in some way by the reader.