About a year and a half ago, I was spending a lot of time on the fiction sharing platform Inkitt. Inkitt lets writers create a profile and upload short stories and even entire novels to the site, where other users can rate and review them, kind of like an online beta reading system. Inkitt also sponsors writing contests. When I was still interested in traditional publication for my first book, Absence of Blade, I entered it in Inkitt’s breakout novel contest. Inkitt pledged to act as the agent for the winner and shop the manuscript to publishers.
I don’t know how it all turned out for the eventual winner, or the ethics of Inkitt’s “platform-agent” model. I bring it up here because of Inkitt’s rating system. For each piece you upload, Inkitt asks you to rate the story for content, such as violence, profanity, sex, and other assorted adult themes. When I uploaded Absence of Blade to the site, I found myself checking off many of these boxes for content. If my book were made into a movie, it would almost certainly be rated R. Yet anyone of any age could waltz into a bookstore and buy it without the supervision of a guardian.
This made me wonder–why don’t books have a rating system like television and film do?
One might argue that violent or explicit visual media have both a more immediate and more lasting impact on impressionable minds, but I’m not sure that’s true. Some of the most powerful ideas and images I’ve encountered came, for me, from books. Literature can be every bit as affecting (positively or negatively) as visual media: take me at fourteen, forcing myself to finish Stephen King’s Pet Sematary at 9 am in broad daylight because I was too scared to read it after dark.
So why no warning ratings on literature?
In a sense there are–they’re called categories. Physical bookstores maintain separate shelves for children’s, YA, and adult literature as well as many other categories. Virtual bookstores like Amazon accomplish the same categorization with algorithms. Besides making it easier for readers of various demographics to find what they want to read, separate kids’ and adults’ shelves help screen kids from material they’re not ready for.
Publishing isn’t subject to ratings boards as film is. The Motion Picture Association of America’s Classification and Ratings Administration controls the ratings films receive based on their violent and sexual content, profanity, and other so-called adult themes. These ratings are often highly subjective and biased against sex while being much more permissible toward violence, including violence against women. For those interested in learning how deep this rabbit hole goes, I highly recommend the documentary “This Film is Not Yet Rated” (itself rated NC-17 due only to the clips from other films it includes), which explores the peculiarities of the MPAA’s rating system.
Some former rating guidelines would be side-eyed now: for example, the Hays Act of 1934 made homosexuality a forbidden subject; when homosexual characters appeared in film at all, it was often as villains whose villainy was heightened by their supposed “sexual perversion” (as homosexuality was defined at the time), and who got their comeuppance in the form of death by the end of the film. This “bury your gays” trope still appears all too frequently in film and literature despite the Hays Code being long abandoned.
Finally, printed material has in fact been rated and censored in the past, but such strictures have relaxed with the times. Take the mid-century Congressional hearing on comic books, which resulted in the implementation of the Comics Code Authority of 1954. The CCA was essentially a self-censorship handbook for comics publishers.
Based on the argument that children were the primary audience for comic books (I’m not sure this has ever been true, but that’s another story), the CCA provided a list of obscene, graphic, and unwholesome material that publishers should strike from their comic books, including murder, true crime, rape, and the depiction of monsters such as vampires, werewolves, and zombies. Although it was a set of guidelines, many distributors would not carry comics that didn’t follow the CCA, giving it the de facto force of law. However, the CCA was all but abandoned by the 21st century, and by 2011 it was completely defunct.
Finally, cultural attitudes toward books may play a role. Reading has long been viewed as a more “wholesome” pastime than watching TV, and educators have promoted literature to kids from the age they can read. In the 18th and 19th centuries especially, it was believed the purpose of reading was to enrich the individual; stories were as much instruction as entertainment.
It’s also a lot harder to point to graphic content in a book, because reading is such a private and subjective experience. It’s much easier to take clips from a film or game and argue the material should get a rating. With a book, readers create the graphics. An enormous amount of imagination and inference is required of readers to take static words on a page and extrapolate them into a mental world; the world thus created is as much the reader’s as the writer’s. In a way, rating literature would be tantamount to rating the reader’s own imagination and the ideas they have access to. Personally, that’s not a road I want to go down.
Readers, I want to hear from you: Should books have ratings, or trigger warnings for sensitive readers? Where is the line between concern for readers’ sensibilities and censorship?
Writing Convincing Aliens Part 1: Biology and Ecology
My science fiction novel, Absence of Blade, is set in a universe where humans are only one of many intelligent species, who maintain an uneasy coexistence in a complex web of interstellar relations. I pushed the creative envelope by making the lead characters members of a nonhuman species, the Osk, and narrating large sections of the novel through their eyes. To do so effectively, I had to create characters with relatable emotions and inner lives who were nonetheless distinctly alien.
Part 1: Biology and Ecology
Creating convincing aliens starts with establishing a well thought-out biology and ecological niche for your alien species. The more thought you put into an alien’s basic biology and environment up front, the less chance you’ll end up contradicting yourself and dispelling the aura of verisimilitude around your invented species once you begin to write. Taking the time to make notes on your critter’s biology and environment will also help you start thinking about the ways your aliens differ from humans in their worldview, culture, and society, which saves time when you’re developing these details later.
Where to begin defining an alien’s environment? Try starting with the big picture: did they evolve on a planet? While that’s definitely the place of origin most ready to hand, it’s far from the only possibility. Take Robert L. Forward’s Cheela, the arguable protagonists of his novel, Dragon’s Egg: the Cheela are flat, wormlike entities who evolved on the surface (and in the crushing gravity) of a neutron star.
Taking an environment that is extreme or seemingly inhospitable to life and imagining what kind of creature could live there is a great way to create really alien aliens like the Cheela, or the sentient hydrogen clouds of Fred Hoyle’s novel The Black Cloud, which evolved in the cold wastes of interstellar space.
If you do decide your aliens evolved on a planet, start thinking about their potential ecological niche. Do they dwell on land, in the oceans, or in floating cities? Do they prefer a narrow range of environments, or are they generalists like humans? Are they herbivores, carnivores, or omnivores? Or perhaps that doesn’t apply at all–maybe they draw sustenance from inorganic sources, by photosynthesis or metabolizing hydrogen sulfide from deep ocean vents. Try looking at terrestrial examples for inspiration: Earth possesses stunning biodiversity, and there’s no reason to believe alien species wouldn’t be just as diverse.
Of course, if you’re like me, you may have thought up your alien’s basic biology before considering the environment that spawned it. That’s okay! In this case, you can work backward from what you know about your species to imagine the environment that gave rise to it. When applied to a work in progress or in the late outlining stage, this method can also help you spot inconsistencies in your species’ design that don’t make sense given their environmental niche.
What Not to Do: Human with a Coat of Paint
Unless there’s a conscious reason for it, avoid creating aliens that are very similar in appearance to humans or other Earth animals. This can come off as lazy worldbuilding because your readers are likely aware that a “space” version of an existing animal is very unlikely to be discovered.
Sorry, Space Dog.
An exception to this rule is if the author is consciously writing humanoid aliens for reasons relevant to the story. Ursula K. LeGuin’s Ekumen universe concerns several different societies of humanoids who are implied to be offshoots of our own species, but who possess varying biologies and cultures that she uses as a vehicle for commentary about our own society.
Similarly, aliens who look nonhuman but think or behave exactly like modern humans probably won’t pass muster with your readers either. I’ll explore how to create convincing nonhuman worldviews and cultures in Part Two.
*I use the term “convincing aliens” rather than “realistic aliens” because at present humans have never made contact with an alien species. It’s disingenuous to comment on what a realistic alien would be like, biologically or socially. However, for the purpose of writing fiction, we can make certain assumptions about the beings that might evolve from a given ecological niche that provide a foundation for creating a convincing nonhuman ontology.