Refrigeration Suits and Orbs with Special Powers

Ever watch a science-fiction show and wonder why they made the aliens the way they did? 

from Star Trek: two Breen and a Cardassian

I always do, and sometimes the answer is not what I expect. Ira Steven Behr's explanation for Breen refrigeration suits in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine certainly made me smile:

I wasn't really in the mood to come up with a new alien race. So I said, "Let's not see them. Let's just put them in costume because they normally live in the cold." -- Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Companion by Terry J Erdmann, Pocket Books p. 277, via Wikipedia.

Well, I was in the mood, so my Chuzeks don't wear refrigeration suits (though they do wear thermal garments). They're cold-blooded people with claws on their leathery fingers and razor-sharp spines on their bald heads. They hatch from eggs and spend the first six years of their lives breathing water.

And why did I make them that way? It came down to a balance between authenticity and entertainment. 

On the authenticity side, it seems almost absurd that real extraterrestrials would resemble us Humans at all. From just a quick look around our own planet, we find:

And speaking of vision, what we call color is really just electromagnetic radiation, essentially no different from radio waves and x-rays. It's just that we happen to possess these orbs that give us special powers to sense certain wavelengths.

So then what body parts, senses and abilities would people have on planets that may be very unlike Earth? Two arms and two legs? Speech we can hear? Eyes that see EM radiation the same way we do? Unlikely.

Authentic aliens might be made out of ooze and communicate by scent. But then they wouldn't make very good story characters. How would they interact with humans? Why would they even try? Would we even recognize them as people? Or they us?

So in the end, I broke down and did the scientifically implausible thing and made the Chuzeks humanlike.

And just in case someday I hit the jackpot and Hollywood decides to turn my stories into blockbusters (a girl can dream), I designed them so they can be played by human actors with just a bit of latex and no need for CGI.

Now with all those constraints in place, I set out to make them as different from us as I reasonably could. That's why they're cold-blooded amphibians.

Star Trek's Lt. Barclay runs a
diagnostic on a character.
And after that I tried to follow evolutionary logic. They have no hair because they're not mammals. Their spines, claws and tough hide were designed to mimic the results of natural selection. 

And lactose intolerance seemed like a no-brainer. Here on Earth, even mammals are normally lactose intolerant after weaning age (we milk drinkers are mutants), and Chuzeks aren't even mammals. 

I was influenced by Star Trek, of course (who wasn't?) - by Klingons and Xindi Reptilians a little and by Cardassians a lot.

The first Chuzek ever was Vek Zoroke. So far, he hasn't come up in any stories. He's more like a prototype or the character who pops out when you open the diagnostic program. 

And he wasn't always a Chuzek.

But that, as the Chuzek character Cheg would say, is a story for another time.