Writing popular fiction

mock version, it truly was humorous.
    "What are you
doing
?" the boy squealed, laughing even harder.
    "What?" Hulann asked, looking about him. His body was still. His hands and feet did not move.
    "That noise," Leo said.
    "Noise?"
    "That wheezing sound."
    Hulann was perplexed. "Mirth," he said. "Laughter like yours."
    "It sounds like a drain that's clogged," Leo said. "Do I sound that bad to you?"
    Hulann began laughing again. "To me… you sound like some birds that we have on my world. They are great, hairy things with three legs and tiny little bills."
    In other words, the writer must realize that the aliens will find human beings as strange as men find them.
    Finally, the writer must apply these alien peculiarities to plot developments. In the following example from
Beast-child
, while Hulann and Leo are fleeing pursuers by means of a cable car dangling above a snowy landscape in the midst of a storm, we see the naoli react in a very individual and different manner, based on his race's traits:
Hulann's tail snapped, then wound around his left thigh, tight.
    "What's the matter?" the boy asked.
    "Nothing."
    "You look upset."
    Hulann grimaced, his reptillian features taking on a pained look. "We're awfully high," he said in a thin voice.
    "High? But it's only a hundred feet down!"
    Hulann looked mournfully at the cable sliding past above them. "A hundred feet is enough if that should break."
    "You've been in shuttlecraft without even a cable."
    "The highest they go is fifteen feet."
    "Your starships, then. You can't get any higher than that."
    "And you can't fall, either. There's no gravity out there."
    Leo was laughing now, bending over the waist-high safety bar and giggling deep down in his throat. When he looked up again, his small face was red, and his eyes were watery. "This is something else!" he said.
    "You're afraid of heights. Naoli aren't supposed to be afraid of anything. Do you know that? Naoli are vicious fighters, hard, ruthless opponents. Nowhere does it say they are permitted to fear anything."
    "Well…" Hulann said weakly.
    "We're almost there," Leo said. "Just steel yourself for another minute or two, and it'll all be over."
    Because he has irrational fears, the alien becomes that much more of a believable character, amusing and sympathetic.
    Appearance, habits, gestures, expressions, sexual and non-sexual value judgments, actions and reactions to plot incidents in accordance with his other-worldly origins all serve to make a non-human character real. You must further explore his eating habits, manner of dress, social customs, forms of entertainment, religion, government, philosophy and a hundred and one other facets of his unusual daily life.
    Then
, when you have created a believable extra-terrestrial race, you must be certain that the various aliens in your story—if more than one appears—are as unlike each other, personally, as one human being is from his neighbor. Certainly, they will all share attitudes and reactions. But just as certainly, their personalities and opinions will differ wildly from one alien to another—unless, of course, you have postulated a race of ants with a group mind and single social goal.
    Remember, too, that not all members of an off-Earth race will be soldiers, bakers, or candlestick makers. Each will have a different career and will have his worldview colored by his talents. One present-day science fiction writer continually portrays alien races—in a consistent future history he has been writing in a number of stories and novels—as each being interested in one pursuit: the building of spaceships, the making of war, and so forth. His fiction lacks credibility because of this simplistic touch, this lack of individuality among separate members of the same alien group, and he is the only major writer in the field who gets away with that inadequacy.
    As with science fiction,
fantasy
has improved in recent years, both in the substance of its themes and the depth of its characterization, though it remains less relevant to the real world, on the whole, than science fiction. This lack of relevancy is an unavoidable part of the form, by its very definition:
a literature dealing with magic and/or the supernatural
, without the scientific rationale for its "wonders" that science fiction must contain. Because it lacks a reasonable, scientific explanation, fantasy is divorced from reality and requires more "faith" on the part of its readership, a greater willingness to